Part of the Blair Witch mania that took hold in the years following the film's release was due
to its ambiguous ending. What did it mean? Was the tragic fate that befell the three aspiring
filmmakers a supernatural one, or was it something more human? Let's investigate
the most popular theories surrounding the abrupt ending of The Blair Witch Project.
The backstory to The Blair Witch Project included the relationships
between its fictional filmmakers Heather Donohue, Joshua Leonard,
and Michael Williams. Josh's backstory included a previous relationship with Heather,
and they'd worked together on a few documentaries prior to Blair Witch. This makes it all the more
upsetting for Heather when Josh vanishes from their tent after a particularly depressing day
when the group hiked for hours only to end up in the same place. Mike and Heather's first
night alone turns even darker when they hear Josh screaming in agony but can't locate him.
"Josh! (Josh screaming in agony) it's over here? No, it's over here."
Production designer Ben Rock explained that Josh had been taken to record the screams in a studio,
and they were then played for Heather and Michael in the woods.
Heather wakes up to find a strange bundle of sticks outside of her tent. Inside the bundle was
a swatch of Josh's actual flannel shirt, a lock of his hair and what was meant to be Josh's teeth,
which Rock confirmed were actual human teeth that producer Gregg Hale got from a dentist.
The bundle also ties the torture of Josh to other Blair Witch mythology, which claims that in 1825,
a ten-year-old child was seen being pulled into Tappy East Creek near Burkittsville, Maryland.
The film's website explains that her body was never recovered and:
"Thirteen days after the drowning, the creek is clogged with oily bundles of sticks."
On the second night following Josh's disappearance, Heather and Mike come
to a strange house in the woods. The film's directors and writers Daniel
Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez explained that according to Blair Witch lore,
something really dramatic happens in those woods every 40 to 50 years.
The timeline of the lore begins in 1785, when Elly Kedward is accused of witchcraft by a group of
children. Kedward is found guilty and banished to the woods to die during a harsh winter.
Following this event, strange events take place in the woods, including the modern case of the
Burkittsville 7. In 1940, seven children were reported missing from the town of Burkittsville,
formerly known as Blair, and are found buried in the cellar of town resident Rustin Parr.
Parr is later executed for his crimes based on the testimony of Kyle Brody,
a child who managed to escape. These deaths are mentioned early in The Blair Witch Project,
when Heather interviews locals about the legend. In describing that part of the shoot,
Sanchez confirmed that the house was meant to be Parr's house.
In both the Blair Witch documentaries within the movie, Parr confesses to the killings.
"Mr Parr, why those seven children?"
"That's what the voices told me."
That voice was, by all accounts, the Blair Witch.
Mike charges into the Parr house while recording, yelling to Josh and encouraging Heather to
follow him. We see Mike and Heather's points of view sweep over the house,
which only becomes more unsettling as they encounter strange symbols written on the walls.
The symbols are from an alphabet known as Transitus Fluvii, which is from a book of
occult philosophy that's supposedly practiced by, you guessed it, witches. Ben Rock confirmed
that the creative team on The Blair Witch Project used this to decorate the Parr house.
The letters also pop up in the Sci-Fi fictional special The Curse of the Blair Witch, which
was aired to promote the release of The Blair Witch Project, during the tale of Coffin Rock.
The mythology explains that Coffin Rock is the site where a search party
sent out after a missing girl in 1886 were brutally killed,
according to film archivist Chris Carrazco in The Curse of the Blair Witch.
The strange symbols aren't the only creepy image decorating Parr's house.
Heather and Mike's cameras reveal dozens of child-size hand prints all over the crumbling
walls. These were obviously left behind by Parr's victims, all of which were children. Rock said:
"Dan had the idea for the kids' hand prints from one time he'd gone to someone's filthy
house and their dogs had made a giant black smear at dog-height throughout the house."
For the actual movie, the hand prints were made using black paint applied
to the hands of art director Ricardo Moreno's young nephews.
It's one of the most memorable moments from The Blair Witch Project, along with
Heather's up-the-nose camera confession. After running downstairs, Heather's camera
swings around to reveal Mike standing in the corner of the basement with his back to her.
Despite her blood-curdling screams, he doesn't move. This final frame of the film left audiences
scratching their heads, leaving Artisan Entertainment, the company that purchased The
Blair Witch Project at the Sundance Film Festival only hours after its debut for $1.1 million,
afraid that the ending was too confusing. Myrick later told Entertainment Weekly:
"When we screened it, people were overwhelmingly confused. However,
when asked if they were scared, 19 out of 20 hands went up."
Originally there was no explanation for why Mike remained frozen in the corner.
Under pressure from Artisan, the team did some reshoots in Maryland and added interviews in
which townspeople talk about Rustin Parr and the disappearance of the original Burkittsville 7.
The interviews alluded to the idea that Parr made the children face the wall
so as to not witness the horrors inflicted on their fellow victims.
So what really happened in the end? There's no definitive answer,
and the filmmakers intended it that way. Director Eduardo Sanchez said:
"There's no rhyme or reason to what's happening in those woods. You were never meant to know."
One theory suggests the filmmakers are actually victims of the Burkittsville townspeople.
After two nights in the woods,
Heather and Josh discuss the unexplained sounds they've been hearing at night, saying:
"But nobody knows we're out here. Yeah, but you ever seen Deliverance?"
Referring to the 1972 film, Deliverance, in which a group of men are stalked in the woods
by deranged locals. In a deleted scene included on the Blair Witch DVD release,
Josh proposes that locals they encountered in town during filming are making a game of
stalking the team, and that this is the cause of the strange incidents.
Fans of this theory suggest Mike is standing in the corner at the end because he's being held at
gunpoint by an unseen person, while Heather is then knocked out. Others say that Mary Brown,
the strange woman interviewed at the start of the film, is one of these people, as the wooden gate
to her mobile home looks similar to both the stick figures and the bundle of Josh's teeth.
Another popular fan theory is that Josh either lost his mind and killed Mike and Heather, or that
Mike and Josh both conspired to kill Heather together. The number of people crewing the
documentary shoot also seems suspiciously small. Most camera operators use assistants, as refilling
a 16 millimeter camera is an involved process, and would be challenging for amateurs shooting
in the woods at night, not to mention how heavy all that equipment would be to carry. Did Josh and
Mike purposely go into the woods with Heather alone because they had more sinister motives?
Heather's diary, recovered under a hundred-year-old cabin by an
archaeology class a year after the filmmakers went missing,
has some interesting notes on the behavior of her crew. The journal details suspicions that
Mike and Josh aren't sleeping. The creative team, when describing how they communicated
with the actors to avoid direct contact, explained that one of their notes read:
"Josh is slowly losing his mind."
Mike also admits to throwing away the team's map in what can only be a possible act of sabotage. A
deleted scene reveals that Josh actually crumpled up the map and threw it on the ground before Mike
destroyed it, meaning both men were lying to Heather about not knowing its whereabouts.
In The Curse of the Blair Witch, it's explained that Rustin Parr's house was
burned by townspeople following his arrest. So how were Mike and Heather able to run around
a house that had been burned to the ground in the 1940s? How is it that the filmmakers
walk south from a river for hours, only to end up in the same place? Heather's journal reads:
"I had the compass out all day. All 3 of us checked
it every 5 minutes. We were going SOUTH all day."
There's also the strange fact that the equipment and footage was found in the
colonial-era foundations of a burned-down house.
David Mercer, the archaeology professor who led his class to the site, explains that even
a forensic expert could not have placed those items without leaving signs of disturbance.
The time warp theory contends that Heather, Mike and Josh hiked into an area of the woods where
time is altered, leading them to hike in circles and to a time when Parr's house is still standing,
and that it was Parr who killed Heather there while ordering Mike to stand in the corner.
This theory is connected to 2016's Blair Witch film, which wasn't made by the original
filmmakers, but has a concept supported in the Blair Witch canon. In the original
pitch video for the 1999 movie, shown on the show Split Screen, narration explains that:
"Sections of the Black Hills area are lost in time [...] once entered, there is no way out."
Of all the endings suggested by fans over the years,
the interpretation with the most evidence is that the Blair Witch,
or a spirit associated with her, possessed the filmmakers. This led them astray and turned them
against each other or used unseen figures to dispose of them. Producer Gregg Hale explains:
"[Kedward] actually wasn't a witch,
but she did a couple of things that kind of made people suspect her."
He told ScreenRant that Kedward was blamed for witchcraft and after being banished to the woods,
quote, "she kind of became the conduit for this thing," as did Rustin Parr in the '40s. Sanchez
often refers to this power as "the entity," which possibly predates human history and notes:
"But the responsibility for triggering the evil falls on human shoulders eventually."
And the film itself depicts some possible supernatural events.
Mike is screaming loudly as he runs through Parr's house in the final minutes of the film,
when suddenly his voice cuts off. That leaves us with the knowledge
that whatever lured Mike and Heather into the house was capable of controlling Mike silently.
Hale implied that the entity doesn't only use Kedward to carry out its evil deeds, saying:
"It just looks for a way to affect people and do things."
In one interview with the townspeople,
a resident says what Rustin Parr did with his victims, stating:
"He took the kids down in the basement by twos and he made one
face into the corner. Really? And then he would kill the other one."
Just when you think you've got The Blair Witch Project figured out, it manages to throw you
another curveball. For all the talk of an entity possessing Elly Kedward, Rustin Parr, or any of
the other figures who might be responsible for torturing the missing filmmakers, the initial
Burkittsville 7 goes unmentioned. Rock gave the inside scoop to Dread Central a few years ago:
"Much debate had gone into the ending of the film throughout the process, and the
final compromise concept was that the children Rustin Parr had killed would have done this,
so after Heather's camera went down, those of us outside the house were to
run in and gingerly run around as if we were children who'd been freed... and when we did,
Heather made that final scream you hear in the movie, that guttural manifestation,
and we all ran into the middle of the house and ran around on the wood floor like idiots."
Give us the possession theories all day long,
we draw the line at creepy spirit children for our own well being.
Don't like that conclusion? Several years ago, Sanchez and Myrick confirmed that when
Artisan pressured them to change the film's ending to make it more definitive,
they ended up shooting four alternate versions that were never used.
These very unsubtle alternate endings range from seeing Mike surrounded by stickmen figures
to him being hanged or crucified. They're pretty universally reviled,
so it's a good thing Artisan decided to trust the instincts of their filmmakers. Myrick said:
"What makes us fearful is something that's out of the ordinary,
unexplained. The first ending kept the audience off balance;
it challenged our real-world conventions, and that's what really made it scary."
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus,
even more Looper videos about your favorite horror movies are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.