On the Bechdecast, the questions asked if movies have women and them, are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands, or do they have individualism? It's the patriarchy and beast start changing it with the cast.
Jamie, I'm so sorry that shut up, shut up podcast with me.
Shut up, my camera down't shut up. I know you recording it is your false shut up. That's basically the movie rights done more or less.
Yep, yep, yep, Heather, Poor Heather, Hello, and welcome to the Bechdel Cast. My name is Caitlin Durante or is it truly?
I have so many thoughts about just the ethics of this movie are so wild. I feel like the wildest thing to me is being like, no, actors, We're gonna use your full government name and then market it as if you have died. Died anyways. My name is Jamie Loftis for now.
And this is our podcast where we examine movies through an intersectional feminist lens, using the Bechdel test simply as a jumping off point to initiate a larger conversation.
Hell yeah, there's a lot of different versions of the Bechdel test. It is a media metric created by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel, originally as a one off bit in her comic collection Dicks to Watch out For back in the eighties, but has since been adopted as a way of talking about gender. Is it's portrayed in big cool movies.
There's a lot of different versions of the test. The one we use is this, we require that there be two characters of a marginalized gender with names speaking to each other about something other than a man for two lines of dialogue or more.
Wow, it's so true.
I forgot to pay attention to it for this movie. I think that it does though, right because Mary and Heath Mary Brown. Yeah, that's a superpass. All right, Well, let's end the episode. So didn't get to speak JK.
We again. We talk about this from time to time that people think our podcast is just talking about whether or not a movie passes the Bechdel test.
And it's my favorite way to find out that someone has been lying to me about listening to the podcast, which is very funny because it's like, I truly don't give a shit if people listen to.
The show or out, like you can just admit that you don't.
Yeah, but I like to imagine I'm like, well, I guess you wouldn't like the show if you really thought it was us teasing that great mystery apart for the better part of two hours. Anyways, you're listening to this, you know that's not the case. We are covering the Blair Witch project, and we have an incredible, long anticipated guest wearing you cannot see, an incredible inappropriate shirt.
Scary stories to tell in the dark. Our guest is the host of the podcast American Hysteria. It's Chelsea Weber Smith. Hello.
I couldn't be more thrilled to be here and analyze this one of my most favorite movies of all time.
So thank you so much.
Thank you for being here.
Truly, we're so pumped out this is Do you spend the whole episode trying to figure out what is so American about the Hysteria? Right? Yeah, I'm so glad you suggested us doing this movie because it feels so Chelsea Webber Smith expanded Universe Coded. I have so many questions about how the Blurwitch mythology ties into stuff you've covered over the years. I'm just so pumped.
I've been like turned into some kind of weird, de facto blair Witch expert, or at least I like to think that. I've gone on a few podcasts talking about this movie, and you know, I think eleven year old me would be pretty thrilled about that.
So shout out to the past me.
Oh yeah, tell us all about your relationship with the blair Witch Project.
The blair Witch Project. Yeah.
I mean, I was eleven when it came out in nineteen ninety nine, and I was very much in the camp of thinking it was real, and I remember hearing about it. I have no idea how I heard about it, probably just being on the Internet, and I was obsessed with the website, which I'm sure we'll get into, which was kind of part of the expanded universe of this movie, which is as important as the movie itself is the
marketing behind it. And you know, my parents were going to see it because I come from a very horror oriented background and they were pumped to see it, and I think they probably knew it was fake at that point, but I'm not sure. But I was pissed because they were going on a date and not taking me, and so I ended up just watching the sci fi documentary that they made as like a supplement.
Yeah, did you watch it, Jamie?
Know that before for today, I did watch it. This movie it's like marketing campaign is like Barbie movie found Dead in a ditch. This is the most four dy game of chess ever played by a movie's marketing campaign.
It's so wild, it's incredible.
And yeah, so basically what that documentary did on the Sci Fi Channel was give a bunch of context to this movie that kind of exists without context, which is why it's so amazing. So I got really into the lore in the background that's happening. And then finally I got to see it, and I think by that time I had figured out that it was not real, because it was when it came to video and it kind
of cat was out of the bag. And of course, you know, a lot of people knew it was fake because it's ridiculous to think that this would be in theaters, right, this footage. But and I remembered hearing about it, and I was like, that's got to be illegal, Like there's no way they can show this like police evidence footage
of these people who went missing. But yeah, I just absolutely loved kind of digging into it because not only was it this documentary, but they had a website that had all of the documents and all of these different interviews and information about these missing people, and yeah, it was just such a full experience. They were on message boards like adding comments to people talking about it to try to like stir up different reactions and to kind
of control the narrative that way. So I think just having that experience as an eleven year old, I just started to make the Blair witch stick figures. There's actually currently one hanging in our yard because I still make them every Halloween. But I started to make them and hang them in weird places to scare people, like when I went camping, like hang them on the trees outside strangers tents, like the absolute little little stinker.
As you guys said, true true.
Blue the colloquial term.
Yeah exactly. Yeah, actually it's the scientific term. So I yeah, I think that that kind of explains how it's been a part of my very DNA since the beginning of my interests in this type of content, like you know, hoaxes and hysteria around some of the elements included in this. It's a commentary I think on a lot of things, so we'll get into it.
We wi So, was this sort of like close to your patient zero for a lot of the work that you do now?
I don't think that's wrong.
Yeah, I think it probably makes a lot of sense because I so enjoyed being like hoaxed, which is of course not always true, but it feels like one of those hoaxes that didn't really cause any damage, Like it
was just kind of a whole lot of fun. I'm sure there's you know, I'm sure there's elements of it, but it didn't to me add to the satanic panic too much of the nineties coming out in ninety nine as it did, and that would have kind of made me have a little bit more of a sour relationship to it, because I don't like demonic satanic horror movies very much because I think it kind of continuously keeps.
This satanic fear going.
But you know, it definitely still has those elements of even like the witch hysteria of the witch trials of the sixteen hundreds in America, which is foundational even though we've never done an episode on it, which is funny. But yeah, I think it is very much part of the fabric of what started my love of folklore and legends because it was such an interesting folklore, whereas a lot of folklore is pretty boring. But when you mix it with kind of an urban legend situation, more modern.
Then you get my attention.
Yeah, Caitlin, what's your history?
I saw this movie in a drive in movie theater in nineteen ninety nine. Oh yeah, I was thirteen, and I was so scared. I was like, this is the scariest movie I've ever seen. And I don't think I've changed my mind since then, Like I to this day think it might be the scariest movie I've ever seen. I know there are haters out there, but I think it's so scary. I think it's such an effective horror movie.
And then I watched the sequel A bunch oh which shadows Book of Shadows, not to be confused with National Treasure two Book of Secrets.
Yes, of course that's true. Yeah. In Flaywash two, do they kidnap the president.
The President of the United States? They do not, but a bunch of scary. I for some reason watched the sequel several times, or specifically Book of Shadows in the early two thousands, because I thought it was just like, I don't know, just like a cool extension of the first one. And I all so to prepare for this episode, watched Blair Witch, which is the third installment of the franchise that came out in twenty sixteen, which I don't remember it even coming out in theaters. It's something I
feel like I should have been aware of. It was not that long ago, but I was like, what is this movie. I don't remember that coming out at all, and it had a theatrical release and everything. It made like forty five million dollars of the box office. Anyway, I watched it. I also thought it was very, very scary. It does rely on a few very tired, nasty horror movie tropes, such as the black guy is the first
person to die, but it was very scary. Anytime people are camping in the woods and it's dark and they're just sort of like waving a camera around the woods and you can only see little bits and pieces, I'm like, I'm scared. The woods are scary. I will never go camping under any circumstances because probably of movies like.
This camping period.
I refuse to go camping. My friends are always like, let's go camping, and I'm like, but why. I like indoor plumbing, I like sleeping on a bed. I like having walls and a ceiling and a floor. So no, thank you, but yeah, I thank you. Yes, yes, I did not realize how much I love this franchise until sort of like revisiting it for this episode. But I think it rocks. So that is my relationship to the blair Witch. Jamie, how about you.
I wish I had as detailed a lore. I feel like I definitely do not remember this movie coming out. Sorry I'm so young, but I do, like I wish I don't know, like reading about everything that surrounded this movie and like hearing about your experiences, like seeing it
for the first time. If I had been like, you know, nine or ten when this came out, I would have lost my fucking yeah, Like this is so It's just it was so fascinating to read about how this was made, even though it's like wildly unethical and probably would get them blacklisted today. But like I was eating this shit up for the last two days. I have been in the blair Witch zone. I really enjoy And Chelsea, I think you that Sarah also showed this movie to you recently.
I love a hoax. I love a hoax, I love a goof, I love people fallen for a big time. I didn't realize to the extent how like integral that was to blair Witch marketing. I'd seen, like my short stories, I've seen this movie once or twice. I think that I was pre poisoned by the infinity parodies of this movie. Yep, so that I had seen this movie parodied a hundred times before I ever watched it in like high school or college, and so I.
Was especially scary movie, right, I feel like scary movie's.
The main Yeah, huge, and it just like any like low hanging fruit for any comedy property. But I definitely remember I definitely saw a scary movie before I saw this. So by the time I actually saw it, I was like, oh, this is pretty scary, like but I was so like subconsciously exhausted by it because it was so everywhere, and I wish that I had gotten to experience the moment where like people were like, no, these kids died, and now they hired look alike actors to promote the movie.
I was like, oh my god. Nineteen ninety nine was such a bizarrely innocent time that that could be true. I don't know. Yeah, I didn't have a huge connection to this movie, but going back, I can't imagine a more perfectly timed movie, for like, right before people figured out how to like hoax check shit on the internet.
But I just anything that involves an arg or some sort of public hoax element, I'm a huge sucker for Like I know that the most famous example is like the Orson Wells were the world one, but there was also Chelsea. Did you show Sarah or did so? No?
She showed me.
I had never even heard of it, and I was shocked. I hadn't heard of it. It was fantastic.
It was so loved. Which what are you talking about?
Pre Dating the blurir Witch project, there was It's streaming for free on tub hashtag thank you to be you be heads to be or not to be? And I say, let's turn on to b babes. It's a fake documentary,
a mockumentary if you will, called ghost Watch. It's a horror mocumentary that came out in nineteen ninety two, was broadcast on the BBC on Halloween Night with real famous BBC anchors at the time, playing out this hoax script that basically leads you to believe that there is a real haunting with like real people dying, the haunting comes to the studio. It's like fucking amazing. It's so good.
Did you, Jamie catch all of the Fox Sister references in it? Because I was seeing shit. I was like the apples hanging. They had like apples hanging from the ceiling, which is how the Sisters stooped people. I think they live on like Fox something Road, And I was just.
Like, I get the jokes. I love what I get with Jo it was for the references.
Yeah, it's spiritualism heavy. It's like, yeah, absolutely fantastic. If you enjoyed The Blair Witch Project, you will also love Ghostwatch. Also. Ghost Watch is like very funny. It's all these like Newsy anchored jokes. Kaitlyn, I think you would love.
It, Okay, I'll check it out.
I just love this very specific genre of horror, mockumentary, hoax horror. Yeah, exactly. And then it was really interesting doing research on I mean there's quite a bit written about not just like the production and the lore surrounding this movie, but how it frames and portrays its main character, Heather. There's a ton of shit to talk about there too. I was very much in my like freshman sociology seminar bag prepping for this episode, so I'm very excited to talk about it.
Hell yeah, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back for the recap. And we are back, and here is the recap of the blair Witch project. So we open on text on screen that says that in October of nineteen ninety four, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Birkettsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary, and then a year after their disappearance, their footage was found. And then we start watching the footage because this is
famously a found footage style movie. We meet the director of the documentary, Heather played by Heather Donahue, and she's just preparing for a trip to the woods to make this documentary on a local legend, the Blair Witch. Then we meet Josh played by Joshua Leonard, who's helping Heather to shoot the dock on a sixteen millimeter film camera. They then pick up Mike played by Michael C. Williams,
who they are meeting for the first time. They've kind of like hired him to be the sound guy, and then they start shooting some stuff, including shots of a cemetery that holds an unusually high number of graves of children, many of whom died in the nineteen forties.
Which I is also just like anytime they're like, oh a lot of kids used to die, You're like.
Yeah, yeah, like fifty.
That just used to be how it was also mad nerd time Dork report. I went to Burkettsville and I took a picture exactly where Heather stood.
WHOA, that's the greatest.
I went with my friend Will Rogers, who is also a big Blair Witch head who does all of our voice acting, and we just had such a beautiful time and.
We really wanted to camp.
Well we didn't have time, but I will camp in those woods one day, Caitlin, I want.
To come, not even a little bit. So we also see them interviewing a few locals in Birkettsville, formerly known as Blair Maryland. They're asking about the Blair Witch and the locals share various scary stories and legends that they've heard over the years. There's mention of a man named mister Parr who in nineteen forty murdered seven children, where he would bring them down to his basement in pairs and make one of them stand facing the corner while
he killed the other one. Also, I guess we should have placed a trigger warning at the top of this because there will be a lot of discussion of murder the Blair.
This is the one time where I'm like, if you need a trigger warning for the Blair Witch Project, I literally do not know what to tell you.
That's fair, that's fair.
Yes, I'm a conservative on this issue.
She's putting her foot down culture.
Yes, just so you know everyone, children aren't murdered on screen, But there's a lot of like lore that is talked about in the movie, and a lot of it is children dying.
It's the Blair Witch Project, you guys.
It is the Blair Witch Project.
If I receive a single email about that, I'm gonna lose it.
Okay. So they also interview a woman named Mary Brown, who has a reputation around town as being like, you know, not very reliable. She's quote unquote a lunatic, and she talks about how she had an encounter with possibly the Blair Witch when she was a child, and she describes what she saw and it's scary and spooky.
And she's like fucking iconic.
Yeah, she is the legend.
Oh.
I just absolutely adore her.
M hm. And I love that the movie spoiler alert bears out that she was completely right the whole time and that they are I guess plot punished for assuming the worst of her.
Yeah. True, mm hmmm. That was also the only movie that that actor ever acted in. I believe.
Well, actually, she signed up to be an intern. They advertised in like the local paper that they needed an intern, and she showed up and her house was exactly like that, including like the weird stick fence. So she's very much like I'm sure we'll get into this, but all many of the actors were just people who lived in the town who were told a rough outline of what they wanted them to say, and then they ad lived.
Like the whole thing.
Oh interesting, okay.
Which is like because it's like all of them are great. Everyone is great.
Yeah, incredible.
Her name is Patricia de Coue Rip.
She has passed away, so let's yeah rip rip in heaven, Patty.
I Yeah, she was wonderful, and I also loved the interview that I always remember is the mom with the kid who's like, it's just a scary story. And I guess that she also. That was like basically no instruction whatsoever. It was just like Chelsea, correct me if I'm wrong, but just like pretend you know what the Blair witches
and like here's sort of what you should say. And she did not sign a release and so the filmmakers had to like tried to find her for weeks because she just gave the best improvised interview and for some reason, that's the interview. I mean, like obviously Mary Brown, but I love the mom one. It felt so real.
She's amazing, and the little girl the whole time is like trying to close her mouth. She keeps being no, no, and then she goes, it's just a scary story. It's not and then she turns to the camera and goes, it's real. So no, it's true, and it's so funny. But I did really quick watch today an interview with them like that was made in like twenty twenty or twenty nineteen, and the girls all grown up and hear this, she is wearing a corn sweatshirt, and I thought that was incredible.
Okay, okay, girl, huh, I love it.
I want to be her friend.
Which, if you think about it, Corn was one of the big instigators unintentionally of Woodstock ninety nine, which is happening in the same year, which I feel is an interesting cultural all connected incidents.
Yeah, we're we ever so young.
Okay. So then it's day two of shooting. We see an interview that they shoot with two fishermen who tell the filmmakers about a girl from the eighteen hundreds who also had an encounter with a witch in the woods. And then they park their car and head into the
woods with these big heavy backpacks. They've got all of their film equipment, and they're making their way to Coffin Rock, where as legend has it, five men were bound together, disemboweled, markings were etched into their skin, and then their bodies mysteriously vanished, as if someone had taken them.
Each man's hands tied to another man's feet. It's just the way how the talks when she's on cameras.
It's so student film, where she's just like, clearly I don't know, parroting like TV talk. Yeah, so good.
Yeah, like a Discovery Channel documentary or something.
It's perfect sure. Performance is just like, ah, just unbelievable, so good, true true.
Then after Coffin Rock, they set up a tent and camp in the woods.
That night.
We cut to the next morning, so it's like day three of shooting. Josh is talking about noises he heard the night before. There was like a cackling outside their tent, and they're like, oh, yikes, but let's keep going. So they start hiking through the woods to find a cemetery that's supposed to be there, but there's no trail. They're kind of lost. They argue about where they're going and whether or not Heather knows where they actually are. Tension
is very high among the group. But then they finally figure out where they are and they come upon this kind of like makeshift cemetery where it's these strange piles of rocks that someone had clearly like assembled. It wasn't
they just found this way in nature. And then they are like these sort of like man made nests in trees that are also filled with rocks, and Heather's like, didn't Mary Brown say something about piles of rocks where she was like referencing the Bible, and they're trying to figure out what the significance of these rocks could be.
And I love how it's like explicitly said, like, oh, I just didn't listen to her. I didn't take her seriously. Yes, I thought she was crazy politic. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then it's like, well, sorry, bitch, you gotta you shouldn't listen to our friend Mary always listen to women that live in the woods. That He's like a basic rule.
Stick fence, listen up. That's what I say.
This person has something to say.
That's rule of survival number one. Okay, So that night they set up camp again by this makeshift cemetery. They hear some more scary sounds off in the distance, but they don't see anything. Then we cut to the next morning and now they're headed back to the car, but they're deep in the woods. They might be lost again.
Heather is constantly insisting that she knows exactly where they are, but Josh and Mike are both pissed at her, and they do not manage to make it to the car, so they have to set up camp again and sleep in the woods that night when and then they hear the same strange noises as the night before. It sounds like large branches are cracking, they hear footsteps. They're very scared.
And every night it gets closer and lasts longer.
Is that the general it intensifies? Yeah, every night, hmm. They wake up the following morning to discover that someone or something has made three piles of rocks right outside their tent, almost as if to symbolize the three filmmakers and their graves anyway, So they're like, let's get the fuck out of here. So they pack up, but oh no, they can't find the map, So now they're more lost
than ever. They accuse Heather of losing the map, and so they're very pissed at her again until Mike admits that he threw the map in the creek the day before because he thought it was useless.
He kicked it, kicked it.
Yeah, what a tantrum.
Yeah a map? What a big baby?
What?
Oh ooh?
I forgot because I had There's apology is so iconic that I sort of forgot that it's basically Mike's fault that they're lost. I feel like Mike, you know, he has his moments throughout the movie. But Mike, he's got to go. He does, and he and he does, he does, he did, I mean fair enough, he does.
Yeah. So they're very pissed at Mike for doing this. They get into a screaming match. They eventually calmed down, but the whole crew is now extremely defeated. They find another spot where there's all sorts of scary stuff, these like sticks that have been tied together. They sort of look like stick figure drawings. They're like the iconic image
of this movie, very recognizable. But they're still lost, and so they have to make camp again for the night, and they wake up in the middle of the night to voices right outside their tent, and then suddenly there's something kind of like rustling their tent from the outside. So they take off running, but it's dark and they can't really see, and they're super freaked out. They find a spot to hide until the sun comes up, and then they return to their campsite. Their stuff has been
fucked with. Josh's belongings are covered in this like weird slime, some witch goo or something, and they're all just like absolutely on the brink of losing their minds. It also seems like they're going in circle where they spent an entire day walking in one direction. They walked south, but they still somehow ended up at the same exact spot where they started that day. There's like this log that had like fallen over a creek and they end up at the same log.
One of the scariest parts to me, Yeah.
This isn't a spoiler, but the third installment of the franchise, simply called Blair Wait like a full Franchi a franchise head. It takes that concept and like really heightens it in that movie basically to suggest that the Blair Witch is capable of like either skewing people's perception of reality, or maybe she's like messing with their compasses or just like doing something to kind of like alter the space time
continuum so that they are like are constantly lost. And it's not clear exactly what's happening in this movie where again they walk in one direction, but somehow I've still walked in a circle. So it's like, what has the Witch done to make that possible?
But this is a movie and like a franchise that had to like work backwards a little bit to create Lord to continue the franchise, and I'm always fascinated at how you're like, oh, sure, yes, it's the Witch can alter the space time continuum, and that way the sense that would happen. They didn't just get lost because they didn't have a map. It was the space time continuum. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
we'll talk about the production. It is not really super relevant to the topic of our show, but I just do need to talk about it because it's so fucking weird. But like the actors also did not know they were going to end up in the same place at the end of the day. Like those are like somewhat genuine reactions.
It's so bizarre because I guess they hadn't. I think I think they say in the movie fifteen hours, but it was not fifteen hours, but it was eight hours that they were hiking, only to be led back to the same spot. I too would cry.
I would cry so hard.
There are so many good moments with Heather where she is like really trying to keep things at bay. Clearly feels a sense of like confidence that turns into guilt as the movie goes on, and then you just like hear how she's when she's at the log and she's like, it's the same log.
You're like, Yeah, she's like in denial for a while, because Heather's like a big denial person and she's presented in denial. And then that's kind of the moment that she breaks and doesn't want to be filmed. I believe at that moment for the first time, and is you know, everybody's been like stop filming, stop filming, stop filming, what
are you doing? And then they kind of all break and they start berating Heather until she basically breaks down by filming her and filming her and filming her, which I think is also a very interesting commentary on what I'm not one hundred percent sure, but it's there.
Let's speculate later.
Yeah, I didn't find a piece of writing that I completely was like, Oh, this is the they, But I've there's been a lot written about controlling the narrative blah blah blah blah, like I'm very excited to talk about.
Yeah.
So they've arrived at the same spot that they were already at, so they went in one big circle. So they have to make camp again and they do and the next morning Heather and Mike wake up and Josh is nowhere to be found, but all of his stuff
is still there, so they're freaking out. They decide to head east this time, but they still can't get unlost, so they have to make camp again that night, and they hear what appears to be Josh's voice calling out in agony outside of their tent, but they you know, again, they can't see, they don't know where he is. There's
not much they can really do. They wake up the next morning there's a bundle of sticks outside of their tent undoes the bundle, and inside is what appears to be Josh's shirt, and wrapped inside the shirt is blood. There's like some teeth and a tongue, maybe some fingers, little body parts.
You know. And Heather's like, let me say nothing.
She does not tell me Nick She's like, if I don't say anything, it never happened. So she's like trying to keep it together. Then we get that iconic scene, the close up of Heather's face. She has like kind of gone off into the woods alone at night. She's crying, she's apologizing, she.
Improvised speech so amazed.
Yeah, mm hmm. She knows she's gonna die, and she's basically saying like, I am to blame for what happened, and I'm so sorry. Then she hears something. It is a man calling out for help, So Heather and Mike re night and go looking for him. They come upon this dilapidated house. They go inside, thinking that Josh might be in there, and they hear yelling coming from upstairs. So they make their way through the rooms around corners. They don't find anything. Then they go downstairs to the basement.
They're again just running through the house, rounding corners. It's so scary.
Yeah.
Good.
Then they so they're in the basement. Mike is kind of ahead of Heather. They both have cameras rolling. She keeps kind of losing him, so she's like screaming. Then we get a shot of Mike's camera and he drops it as if he's been kind of like attacked. Then we cut to Heather and her camera. She's still going down the stairs. Then she goes into the basement and sees Mike standing in the corner facing the wall. She
screams memes. She drops her camera as if she was attacked by the Blair Witch, but you never actually see the witch on screen. And then that's the end of the movie.
To budgetary reasons, it's so good, it's so much better that they didn't show. Yeah, it's it's the monster problem. You show the monster and it ruins it. It's always gonna be scarier in your imagination, and so many horror movies do that. At the end, you're like, no, that sucks when you just show me sucks ruined.
We didn't need to see your goofy looking.
Monster unless it's Tim Curry in it.
On a weird spider.
At the end of it, rip it's hard out. I read that they had someone appear and like they thought they shot footage but it didn't come out, or something like that of like someone on the production wearing all white and wearing white pantyhose on their head, and then they were.
Like that, well that it was like, I don't know it even if they meant to show it or not, but they did that as part of what we'll get into the making of the film.
And it's the part where Heather's going, what the fucky is that? What the ucky is that?
And she just turned and she had no idea that someone was going to be an all white like running beside.
While scar Let's take another quick break and we'll come back to discuss.
And we're back. I would love to start by talking about the production of this movie, just because it feels so important to do like so much. I mean, I guess maybe not to feminism, but whatever, it's so important.
I think there's relevant stuff.
Yeah, they're very much is this is I mean, this is a movie written and I mean written quote unquote because it's heavily improvised, outlined and directed by two guys, Daniel Merrick and Eduardo Sanchez. And we've like heavily implied to this so far. But what I didn't realize is this is like the X Games of improv. Yes, and way to put it, the actors like were actually obviously knew they were in a movie, but did not know what was going to happen. They did not know who
was going to die or when. The part that like sits least well with me about the turbo improv approach is that they were given less and less food so that they're acting like I mean, the ethical issues are many, but I just I had no idea that that is the way that this movie was made, and I found it fascinating.
Yeah, the directors and then there's a producer named Greg.
Who were real Greg behavior.
Truly, they in the cast and call let people who auditioned know that it would be a highly improvised, difficult shoot, and.
Then they all got paid like five hundred dollars or something. Oh it's non union with pay, travel and meals. Three weeks in Maryland, extremely challenging roles to be shot under very difficult conditions, and you're like, God, we got to be on strike forever.
This can't during lifelong trauma.
Yeah, yeah, truly.
Yeah the bar is low, but at least they let the actors know that it would be very difficult and strenuous, because we've come across casting situations like this where the filmmakers did not let the actors know to what extent they would have to be I think we talked about was that the Human Centipede episode. Maybe that, like the actors were not fully filled in on like what they would have to be doing physically, and like the various I think horror things they have to endure.
Cannibal holocaust. Did that? I don't know if that's what you're thinking of. It could be. I wouldn't be surprised if it was also the Human Centipede.
Though it's interesting because as brutal as this shoot sounded, it doesn't sound like any of the lasting trauma for the actors, which is mainly we're talking about Heather Donna Hue, who has since changed her name to ray Hans. That was as of twenty twenty, which I think I haven't looked into it thoroughly, but I think is at least somewhat related to the fact that the Blur Witch Project
uses their full names. But I didn't find very much about like being particularly traumatized by deproduction of the movie, but rather more like after it came out, especially for Ray Hants Dona Hue at the time, and that's also the name of the character, so she's given a number of interviews over the years, and I find her to be very interesting because I'm curious what you both remember about the reception of this movie when it came out.
It sounds like, I mean, all three of the actors, you know, because of sort of the naivete of like nineteen ninety nine Brain some people were like pissed off that they were actors that were not dead, which sounds stressful in itself, but it sounds like Heather in particular caught a ton of shit for this. She got the Razzie for Worst Actress, which makes absolutely no.
Sense, absolutely no sense. No, it infuriates me beyond shit.
Gives the performance of the movie easily, like I was completely shocked by that.
I want to share a quote from her yeah, where she speaks to that actor formerly known as Heather Donna Hugh says quote, I had actually done a student film two years before with a young female filmmaker who definitely had a lot of bravado. I had to think, what kind of woman would actually keep the camera running through horrible times A normal person would have stopped filming, So I had to take that character to that extra driven angle. I don't think there were a lot of female characters
like that in movies at the time. Definitely. I feel like things have changed a lot. There's been a little more leeway for female characters. I won the Razzie for Worst Actress that year, and I think that was partly because of the character being judged rather than the performance.
She was a very driven woman who didn't wear a mascara and was on camera in nineteen ninety nine, so she's basically saying, like people hated that character because of and you know, we'll talk about that and the gender of it all in.
A bit, but like the gender of it.
Yeah, she was like unfairly criticized as a performer because of the way her character is. And again it doesn't help that like her full name was used, which she also regrets. Yeah, that's like her biggest regret of the movie because she like couldn't escape the Blair Witch Project because her full name was used as the character she plays.
Which I feel like that's a bad idea. But also I've read different like people are like the filmmakers shouldn't have done that. I'm like, I agree with that, but also the filmmakers could not have possibly seen this indie movie making a quarter billion dollars, Like it is just very unfortunate that that happened to all three of them.
But I think it's particularly like it seems to have affected the actor formerly known as Heather Donahue, especially because of how particular and like it seems gender that backlash was towards her.
Well. Also, to speak to the Razzie again, it's like really absurd to me because as we've talked about the acting was also kind of real, like she was actually very very scared, right, And to give a little bit more about the production, basically how it went was each day the actors would get GPS coordinates to go to and when they got there they would find like a box with information, very scant information about whatever they needed to get across that day, information wise, plot wise, and
then pretty much everything else was improvised.
So urgy, yeah, yeah, so bizarre.
Yeah, and yeah, the director's producers following them through the woods screaming at night. At one point they they recorded one of the director's kids that lived across the street just playing and doing whatever they did, and just boom boxed it outside their tent. As we mentioned, there was the guy who in all white. You know, there was like the baby crying. They set up all of the stick figures, none of that. None of those things were things that the cast was aware of at the time.
It's like they were very very scared. They didn't know the tent was gonna start shaking.
You know.
It's like, I don't understand how I would be interested to see if the razzies, I mean, I guess they would have come out before Scary movie because Scary Movie was two thousand. But in Scary Movie they just take the snot scene, which unfortunately kind of became the most famous scene in the movie because when Heather is crying and apologizing to Josh's mom and Mike's mom and her own mom, and it's such good acting and she's got snot coming out of her mouth, which is amazing, Like
it makes the scene so real. It's like silly, but you're also like, yeah, that's what happens when you cry that fucking hard. Like having an actor cry so hard that snot is coming out of her mouth is good acting. And then it was parodied in Scary Movie so much, and it was just like so much snock ever knows that's funny, but you know, it's like it just it cast a pall kind of backwards on the movie and now people just think of her with snot pouring out her nose, which it's so annoying.
It's so unfair her. And I mean she also, in that same interview that you were quoting, Kitlin like describes like the frustration of like using her real name, making her essentially like Ip belonging to the Blair Witch expanded universe.
Which sounds infinitely frustrated again in a way that I don't think is malicious because who could have seen it, But it's still like, it seems like the conversation and the parodying around this movie affected her, particularly in ways that feel very like of the time, because we don't even see Heather on screen very much, because like she as we'll talk about in a bit, is like for the most part, dictating what you see and how you
perceive what's going on. But for the few shots, I guess that like people were fat shaming her or like judging her body, and like, which is just I'm This is a quote from I believe this is from the weak oral history of this movie that came out eight or so years ago. She says, no size eight women was playing the lead in dirty jeans with no mascara, with unwashed hair. No Angenoux was willing to be so unfuckable. I was the most unfuckable Angenoux to ever be in
a blockbuster. But that was the thrill, the fuck you thrill of it. How could I say no to that? Nobody wanted me to go into the woods with a bunch of strange guys, But how could I say no to improvising an entire feature without a stitch of makeup, with layers of clothes and dirt and knives and nothing but a pile of rocks to scare you with bad ass. She seems really fucking cool. And then she retired from acting and became a weed farmer, and I'm just like, God, bless hi cod good for you.
Also, before she got cast in the movie, she was a founding member of an improv company called Red Shag, and she was in a feminist off off Broadway fringe movement theater called Collision, So feminist icon actor formerly known as Heather Donahue and a feminist off Broadway fringe movement theater.
It's so fucking cool, but it's like just even hearing. I think part of the point of this, like, part of what makes this movie plausible is that everyone looks like people and like and after several days in the woods, which they were, everyone looks like shit, because how could you not look like shit? But of course the only backlash it like, you don't hear about how Mike looks like shit after three days in the woods. You only
hear how Heather looks like shit. And judgments of her, which again it's like, for this time is not at all surprising, but I was surprised at how much it seemed to really affect the actor's life moving forward. And I appreciate that she's been vocal about that through the years.
And it's funny because it's like she's not even it's not that she's unsupportive of the franchise, Like she mentions that she saw the twenty sixteen Blair Witch movie and thought it was really good and all this stuff, but also met with the filmmakers or the producers or whoever was in control of the franchise and was like, please just keep my name out of it, because the franchise, like as you both know, continues with like her brother goes back to try to find out what happened, and
it's like her name is like connected as a dead person. It just sounds like, yeah, absolutely maddening. And also I'm like, how many people in the world have ever had this problem? It must be very isolating to have this problem.
It's right because as part of the marketing gimmick of this movie, one of the co directors, Eduardo Sanchez, set up this what became a famous website to help promote the film, but it was basically feeding into the illusion that this was a real documentary, that these were not actors, they were student filmmakers making a documentary, and that they
died in the woods. So much so that like those three actors were like listed as having been deceased on IMDb for like a full year or something like that, and a bunch of people thought that those people had actually died and so like, so the actor's parents were getting calls being like, I'm so sorry that your kid died, like condolences, and like, what kind.
Of weird ass person is, Like I've got to call up this mom give condolences.
It's so strange.
And to add to that, they also like made missing posters for them and posted them on college campuses, which was so smart because that's like definitely the age I feel like that was going to go to this movie. And so even at the premiere they handed out posters and I want to get my mits on one of those original posters. So bad of the missing people. But yeah,
it's like they really went hard. They didn't do any press before the movie, the actors, and they never showed any trailers, and that was another you know, so they saved a bunch of money on advertising, which was just really smart by doing this like gorilla marketing campaign.
And I think that like not that like a ton of people, like except you, Chelsea, like would have seen the sci Fi the doc on Sci Fi ahead of time, but that just like lends the credibility of what you're seeing. It's just ugh, it's so cool.
They put it out three days before, which was cool. It was like three days before it premiered in like wide release.
Yeah, so smart, And I didn't I also didn't realize just like when I was reading through the oral history that originally like the whole sort of mockumentary aspect and like cutting out to members of the family as like and you know, they died at the beginning of the movie. It was not supposed to be all found footage. But then it just like the filmmakers executed everything so well and the actors did such a good job at like being in the X Games of improv that that was
the movie. It's so fucking cool. So the last making of anecdote I wanted to share has nothing to do with their show, but I just thought was funny, was that Josh did not know that he was going to die, but then like got one of their like freaky little messages and was like, hey, wait till Mike and Heather go to bed tonight and then just like leave the tent. And he didn't know why he was being forced to leave the tent. And then the filmmakers were like, all right,
you're dead, Let's go to Denny's. And then they brought him to Denny's. Done.
Denny's is perfect.
That's so funny.
That is exactly where I would want to go after that.
Denny's.
It's an American institution.
Is always there for you anytime.
So if it hasn't been clear. The cast camped in the woods through basically the entire eight day shoot, so they weren't like shooting, you know, your standard whatever fourteen sixteen hour day kind of thing, and then like going into a trailer or going in I think they did spend one night in a hotel, and it was because their campsite was basically flooded, just water everywhere, like an inch of water in their tents kind of thing.
And the filmmakers are like, well, we can't kill them. We're only paying them five hundred dollars for the worst days of their lives.
But the rest of the time they were actually like camping in the woods during the entire shoot. So it was like very uncomfortable, and like we mentioned before, the crew was like feeding them less and less. They were like, you know, your safety is important to us. We're never gonna like put you in extreme harm's way, but we
also want you to be very uncomfortable. So like they would scale back on the amount of food that they gave the cast each day so that when they were like we're very tiired and hungry, like that was coming, which is like very abusive.
Yeah, as we.
Alluded to, it just sounds miserable.
Yeah, And it was unclear of like how much of that was communicated in advanced Like I wasn't able to find like super extreme detail other than they were told in advance that it was going to be a very difficult shoot. But I don't know, like, yeah, if they were told that they would not receive enough food kind of thing. Yeah, But yeah, I mean I think that the ethics of this movie are definitely like can and
should be called into question. I'm not advocating for these kinds of movies to be made more, but it's pretty fucking cool. It's got some.
Good performances out of it. So long, I want to say one last quote from the actor who plays Heather daughter you. She says, quote, It's very hard for me to talk about the backlash because for me it was so directly personal. It was my mother sympathy cards. It was people coming up to me on the street telling me that they wished I was dead, saying they wanted their money back.
They're such weirdos, freak show show.
For being in a movie like Go Home. It was me in my eighty four Toyota Silica breaking down in La On Losianaga underneath the billboard with my own face on it. It was a profoundly surrendal experience. I feel like her treatment by the public upon this movie coming out is not dissimilar from her treatment within the movie.
And maybe I'm reading too much into things here. Let me know what y'all think of this, Because as I was watching the movie, and having not to brag or anything, but having directed a few students films myself, I was picking up on a very familiar sensation of like implicit gender bias, where obviously the cast of this movie Slash. The crew making this documentary about the Blair witch within this movie has one woman and two men, and the woman is in charge. She's the director of the movie.
This is her project. It seems like it was her idea to do this and that these two guys are just helping her make it. And throughout the movie they are constantly getting pissed at her and blaming her for everything that goes wrong. Now, are they pissed at her specifically because she's in charge and when things go wrong
you generally blame the person in charge. Or are they pissed at her because she's a woman and they don't trust that she's capable and that they don't trust that she can get them back safely and all of these things. Is it maybe a little bit of Column and columb because like they never explicitly say anything like I don't trust you or think that you're capable because you're a woman. But also a lot of sexism is not that explicit.
It is extremely implicit because like, again, I've been in situations where I was like the only fem person and in many of those cases, like I was in charge and I was surrounded by men and I could tell that the men around me just like weren't taking me seriously. They were questioning my judgment, They weren't trusting that I could get the job done. They were blaming me for anything that went wrong, regardless of it was my fault or not. And no one like outwardly said I don't
trust you because of your gender. But when something like that is happening, you can just like tell that you people are perceiving you in that way. And so I'm convinced that these two men kept getting so pissed at Heather because of this implicit gender bias. Is she making mistakes along the way, sure, but I do feel like she's the subject of this like unfair scrutiny because she's a woman in charge.
That's also supported by the fact that so much of this movie is improvised under duress. So it's like your natural biases, you know. And this is not to say that the two actors hate women or anything like that, but I do feel like the instructions they're given are so vague that, like, of course, your biases are going to sort of like bubble to the surface in those kinds of situations. It feels like a very bizarre, like a Stanford prison experiment kind of way to reveal those biases.
I was struggling most with Mike at the beginning, and then as the movie went on, I thought Josh was more interesting because Josh starts out like he's her friend, and he is defensive of her towards the beginning, but when things start to go wrong in a meaningful way, he turns on her. And I feel like I've certainly had experiences like that with men that like start on your side, but when it's like ooh no, they kind
of leave your side when it counts. And in a way that totally blows up in Josh's face because Mike's the one who fucking kicked the map into the creek, so whatever, But I felt I also had that same tingling sensation of just oh yeah, of course they are going to turn on her faster, and they are going to assume less competence. And all of this is complicated by the fact that none of them are experienced in what they're doing, like they're doing filmmakers. They don't fucking
know what they're doing. But I think it's clear, especially as things get worse and worse, that Heather is more quickly turned on, and like that leads up to the scene that we've already started talking about, but I want to talk more about of like where she's antagonized by Josh and that's a conflict that is never resolved between them due to their dying.
Yes, well, and it's just like I think it would be the only way to really test it, because you know, Heather makes mistakes.
There's some hubris there.
She thinks she knows where she's going, things that would piss me off if I were one of those guys. Sure, But had the director been a man, I don't think there would have ever been a scene where they're like braiding this man and filming this man, And I think there would have been like more willingness to collaborate on the problem versus just like kind of blaming Heather and ganging up on her and like, yeah, so I don't think Heather's like some angelic, innocent woman character who's.
Completely fairly treated.
But like, I just think the way that we'd be able to really see is like switching out how they're for a male director, and I don't imagine that it would have gone the same way. I think there might have been fist fights perhaps, but I don't even know about that.
Yeah, I think the thing that struck me the most outside of them, like accosting her was And the first sort of inkling that like Josh is maybe has more of this inherent bias that he probably thinks he does, is that he is very, very quick to believe that Heather lost the map he is. That is like the first time that you're like, oh, that's your friend, where are you now? But he goes with Mike's version of the story Overheathers seemingly for no for a reason it
wasn't clear to me. Yeah, And I feel like his behavior towards her, I mean, I think it's like intentional in the way that it's written and performed, but like there is like tru that is broken between these two friends. That feels. Yeah, it is like a tricky combination of leadership and like who is sort of on top of the pile? Whose project are we here for? Probably for no money because you're in college, and the gender dynamics, so it's so wild, like I can't believe this movie
exists because you're like that. I'm sure that there's a bit of all of the actors, whether they like it or not in how that plays out. But I like, I think that while all of these things are true, like Heather, it can be up her own ass at moments. And I like that they are like she's an I mlegant film student too, Like she doesn't know what she's doing.
None of them know what they're doing. It's the way that they treat each other once they all realize they're in way over their head that I feel like is telling well to that.
Like you said, Jimmy, I appreciate that we have a flawed female character on screen because so few movies allow a woman or a fem of any kind to be flawed. They're so often portrayed as these like one dimensional, perfect little angels who never make mistakes, they have no bad qualities, which is obviously not what being a human.
Is, right, or like the expectation of like hypercompetence in any woman in the front of a movie, right.
So I like that she is. Yeah, she displays a lot of hubris, although I do believe because one of the major sources of tension between them is that they keep blaming her for getting them lost, and she keeps insisting that they are not lost, and it's hard to tell what's actually true, Like does she know exactly where they are in the map and where they are going like she says she does, and it's just the witch who's again like altering their perception or a reality or
whatever the witch does. Is it that she's like too proud to admit that she is actually lost and she wants to inspire confidence that she is capable and she does know where they're going and that she's not leading
them to danger, that kind of thing. But because sense of direction has so many gender stereotypes attached to it, and yet men stereotypically are perceived as a gender that is really good at directions and they know where they're going and they just have an inherent sense of direction and then they can just look up at the sky.
Or alternatively, I think that there is like a stereotype that I find less true as time goes on, but that if they are lost, they cannot admit it. They won't stop and ask, yeah, it's so embarrassing.
Meanwhile, women are perceived stereotypically as people who have a really a sense of direction and who just like cannot navigate where they are or where they're going. And I think that plays a large part into why I feel like there's such strong implicit gender bias among these characters, is because such a huge part of the tension between them is maps and senses of direction and where they're going and that kind of stuff.
Even when Mike admits to kicking the map, he blames Heather by saying it was useless anyway, So like, I kicked it because you got us lost to the point where this map is useless, So why not just fucking kick it in because you know it didn't matter anyway.
So furious because she's like, it was useless to you parentheses because you don't know how to read it, But it was not useless to me. I knew exactly where we were on that map, And I like believe her as she's saying that, Like, I think that's probably legitimately true, And it's just that the witch is totally to them.
Even if she's not telling the truth there, Like, that's not the reason that he doesn't believe her, So it doesn't even matter to me. It matter because I honestly I was like, I don't know if I believe her. It seems like she was kind of bullshitting to some extent in the previous day. But it's like it doesn't really matter because I think that like Mike doing that is even more telling because he doesn't know her. He has no reason to not trust that she doesn't know
what she's talking about. He met her yesterday, So this is like a bias that has nothing to do with who she is, right Damn.
I mean there's like, I don't know if we have more Heather, but I think there is another female character or woman character that we need to discuss, and that.
Is the Witch, the Blair Witch.
Yeah, the Blair Witch.
Yeah.
And you know, I think like when you do watch The Blair Witch, you don't get any information about kind of where or who this Blair Witch actually was. When you watch the documentary, you learn about the character of Ellie Kedwick, who was a witch who was accused of like drinking the blood of children, and these children in the town came or like the whole town then like tied her to a tree. She died of exposure. She had like strange symbols carved into her by this group.
So it is kind of a satanic panic situation originally, but you know, you don't know was this witch actually doing these things, because after she gets murdered, essentially kids still start disappearing in the town, right, So that's when it takes on this sort of paranormal dimension. And what I think is so interesting is we get the character in the Blair Witch Project and then also in like all the supplementary stuff of Rustin Parr, who is the child murderer from the nineteen forties.
Who just a wild because his name is so rest in peace. Oh yeah, that's my brilliant contract.
It's based on repute's names.
Yeah.
Yeah, So Ellie Edward is a close anagram to Edward Kelly, who I forget who that is, but child murderer? Yeah, okay, righter right.
I was like, we have the right guest on Thank you so much.
I just read about it on scholarly journal, Wikipedia and then immediately forgot who it was. Rustin Parr is a character name or like part of the lore because the directors were like, what's an anagram for resputant? So wow, Jamie.
I need to correct myself really quick. Edward Kelly was a an occultist.
Okay, okay, I don't think he murdered anyone you know for Edward Kelly intact.
But all this to say, and we've talked about the representation of witches in many episodes. We've covered a lot of which movies.
And we're fans of which media in general.
True, how be I was making a list of everything we've covered. We've done the Avich, We've done Witches, We've done Witches of Eastwick, The Love Witch, The Craft, Practical Magic, hocus Pocus. I would even throw Kiki's Delivery circollowen, we Love a Witch, right, And many movies that are not necessarily specifically about witches but have witch characters, such as the Wizard of Oz and things like that. Witches are very pervasive in Hollywood media, and especially horror media.
And if you're covering movies that center women, you're gonna end up covering a lot of movie about witches. Very true, true, like positively and negatively right, because.
I mean, most of these which movies are playing into the stereotypes and the popularly held misconception that you know, witches are evil, they're agents of the devil, they're malicious.
They're almost always women, which like kind of lends this sort of like, well, women equals witches equals women are evil, which is a belief that got a lot of people, again mostly women, killed during various witch hunts and witch trials throughout history, even though, as we've discussed on other episodes, people who were perceived to be witches throughout history were usually just like empowered women or people who didn't marry
formed of yeah, unmarried women, healers, people who didn't conform to very rigid roles as far as like gender and sexuality and things like that throughout history, and then people are like, oh, well they must be a witch, and then a lot of them were persecuted. This movie is doing the same shit.
Absolutely, Yeah, Chelsea, I'm curious what your thoughts are on that, because it's very interesting to me that, like, you see some sort of transgressive ideas with Heather and bicentering her, but it does feel like there is like a saminess even though the way that this movie presents everything is so different, but there is a sameness to like a woman crosses a boundary and like gets a little too curious. I think that's another trope that is kind of present
here and not really challenged. And yeah, the idea of the witch is just like reinforced in a way that I didn't even really almost notice the first time, because you don't see the witch, which I think helps, but it doesn't really resolve.
The issue, right, you don't get who the witch was in the actual movie.
Then you get the background, which does kind of present a.
Possible false accusation, but then kind of, Okay, are still getting murdered. This ventual ghost is still kind of coming after children. And I think that there's a lot to do with the Satanic panic in this movie, especially as it relates to women, and for anyone uninitiated into the
Satanic panic. In the eighties and nineties, there were tons of accusations of Satanic cults kidnapping and ritually abusing children, and this was just an idea so widely held that like Oprah Heraldo, police departments all over the country were trained in spotting Satanic ritual abuse. People were recovering memories by like dubious therapy techniques of abuses in their childhood that were so outrageous that it's so difficult to believe
now that this ever happened. Children were also being coerced unintentionally by therapists and ended up in saying that all these things happened, like that their teachers in their daycares, which was like a big place like daycares or the center of this, the teachers were not only abusing them, but they were like putting them in kittie pools full of baby sharks that were biting them, And that their teachers were flying around on broomsticks and they were flushed
down the toilet to like live in the basement, and that there was like a gorilla's arm ripped off and a horse was sacrificed in the classroom. And yet no shred of physical evidence was ever found.
I know all of this, and it is never less shocking to just hear it sort of raveled off in the list. Yeah, let's just you know, right, baby sharks, gorilla arm right.
Right, right, right right, you know.
So it is so difficult to believe now, and yet it was like a widely held belief in the nineties.
There was also a lot of media and like, yeah, children's toys and a lot of things that were blamed for perpetuating this panic.
Yes, rock music, yeah, D and D Yeah, absolutely everything was suspect in the eighties and nineties that fundamentalists didn't like or feminist, because feminists were also unfortunately part of this as well, not necessarily for any reason other than trying to protect children and not being educated on kind of what was going on. Because guess what, we probably all would have been like part of this because when you were in it, it was so scary. You didn't
have any evidence that this wasn't happening. It's such an amazing story that there's like satanic.
Cults in the woods.
It's like, it's easy sometimes to believe these things when police departments in the FBI are reporting this as actually happening, right right, But then I think there's an interesting thing happening at the same time. Where Like, on one hand, the Satanic panic largely blamed women, like a lot of the people who went on trial for abuses were women who were said to be sexually abusing children in these
satanic rituals. And it also had a lot to do kind of in retrospect around the fact that women in the eighties and nineties were starting to work more and more and be outside of the house and daycares were becoming a lot more popular, and so a lot of people,
including myself, theologists who look back on this. Do believe that a lot of this backlash toward these daycares had to do with the fact that they were this symbolic thing that said, Okay, women are no longer mothers, Like women are coming out of this long term position as only homemakers, and they're like kind of like fuck this more than you know, like the sixties seventies you have more women working, but by the eighties it was like a lot more common, and it was also like very
condemned by fundamentalists. So you have this like weird blame that is coming like the Witch Trials in a way, right. I mean, men were certainly blamed for some of these ritual abuses, and some men were blamed for some of the ritual abuses in the Witch Trials as well, But generally when we look at these things, we look back and say, okay, this was like women doing these things,
which is so wild. But then in the nineties rattling this off, you also have third wave feminine, which I think is like, that's why I think you get so many like good witch movies, because even like the Craft is still like kind of an empowerment film, it's like also has sort of the hubrius of power and the problems with that. But you know, I think there was a reclaiming of the Witch in the nineties that came along with this new kind of feminism that was just
kind of retelling these stories in a new way. So you have kind of all those influences throughout because they're writing this movie throughout the nineties, right, it comes out in ninety nine, but throughout the nineties, like we're still having the Satanic panic happening, And originally the movie was supposed to be more satanic. They were supposed to find all these like satanic artifacts and pentagrams in the house, and then they changed direction for whatever reason.
Which I'm grateful that they did. This is not quite Blair Witch adjacent, but I also feel like connecting things to daycares. It also feels so tied in with like the stranger danger ideas of the eighties and where it was like it was popular to make children afraid of strangers and present strangers as the ultimate danger when it's statistically more likely for danger and abuse to come from
someone you know, and all this stuff. That's sort of like you don't think that there would be some level of presence to it in the Blair Witch Project, but there is like the idea of a stranger luring you out into the woods to get you. Like it does feel like there's a little bit of like late twentieth century stranger dangerous stuff tied in there as well. I wanted to talk a little bit about Heather as the visual storyteller of this movie for the most part, and
I kind of wonder. I mean, I've read a couple of essays about it. The one that I want to share stuff from is from two thousand and two written by Denica McDonald. It's called Trespasses into Temptation, Gendered Imagination and the Blair Witch Project. I don't agree with everything in in this essay, but I thought it was really interesting and sort of like gets into this in a
very academic way. She's quoting the shit out of Laura Mulvey and I like had flashbacks to my freshman year of college, but both kind of talks about how there is, first of all, the very sey presentation of the Witch like we've just talked about, but also in a way that feels like it possibly got lost when the movie came out because there's so much about this movie that's so interesting and different that it's like a little easier to forget that there are very stereotypical horror tropes present
in this movie too, where like a woman gets too curious and has to receive her come up and for crossing this invisible boundary of where you're not supposed to go. So I wanted to share a little bit from her essay because I just thought it was interesting. For the first half of the film, Heather is the strongest character in the film. She's focused, organized, domineering. She refuses to be the object of both the larger films gaze and the documentary's gaze. She has brought her own camera to
record all of the events that take place. Moreover, the project was her idea. She takes possession of the only map for the excursion, as well as the only compass. It is also Heather who has scouted out the project and who leads the excursion. Literally, she holds all the cards. However, out of all the characters, it is Heather who has
the most difficulty accepting the reality of events around her. Thus, when she realizes she is losing control of her controlled and well planned project, she frantically dismisses what she cannot explain. She repeatedly refuses to accept the seriousness of the situation she finds herself in and desperately tries to hold on to what is real by reheating phrases such as things like this just do not happen in America. This is America.
It is impossible to get lost, it is impossible to stay lost, which I think I wonder how improvised that line was, because that, to me, I was like, Wow, that's a fun in like doctoral thesis is worth of something to talk about inside of that.
And then they all scream God bless America.
Yeah, or the two guys just starts screaming that, which I think is interesting too. Write like she says that, and then they just start screaming these like American anthems. Yeah, just because you know they've they've obviously lost it a bit.
But that's also interesting.
But the idea of like, and I genuinely don't know how intentional this was in the filmmaking because of how it was made, but I think it's very rare to in general, give anyone who's not a man a camera
and give them narrative control. I love that they give that to Heather, and they also take it away from her in certain moments where it's like, technically most of this movie is presented by quote unquote the female gaze, but it isn't because of not only the moments where you see the black and white of I think it Josh is shooting, but also it's like inherent to the movie. And I think, like the website lord that two male
directors were hired to edit it so fascinating. I don't know even what to make of it, because a lot of it feels like probably unintentional, but to like have a woman at the front of a movie thinking that she is controlling, you know, controls the gaze of the movie, but everything about the way it happens is taken out of her control and is like sort of used to undermine her credibility as a storyteller because you know that she dies when the movie starts, and you get to
see all of these things that she doesn't want you to see. I just think it's very interesting. I can't think of another movie like it, I know, definitely, and
then the America stuff just I don't know. I feel like that's almost like a little cherry on top of what you were talking about just now Chelsea, where it's just like sort of the exceptionalist arrogance of Americans and of like this like specific late twentieth century kind of moment where you're like a bad thing wouldn't happen in America, and you're like, oh, baby, hang in there.
This is like so similar to me, to another thing, and I am absolutely obsessed with which is the story
of the Donner Party. And they are another group of people who kind of marched into a situation believing that everything would be completely fine because sort of that maybe partially because of the halo of protection that we have as Americans, or we think that we have because of this idea of like manifest destiny, like this is our land, this is our place, like nothing bad can happen to us, because like we are chosen to go westward and like it's sanctioned by our higher power, and so we can
act however we want. Because the Donner Party just they did things like stop and party for three days when
they were like two weeks behind the weather. They did these things that landed them in this situation, believing hucksters who told them they'd be completely fine going in this other direction and getting lost, and there's so there are a lot of parallels between these two stories, not to say that you know, it's the same intention behind going into the woods, but there is something like particular to me, I don't know about like three white young people going
into the woods being like everything's gonna be totally fine. You know, we're gonna like go and I would do this speaking as someone who would absolutely have done this and absolutely been the heather of the situation.
I think we all would have been the heather at different points in a judgment.
Just a fact.
Yeah, So I think that there's still like an interesting thing about that, like hubrisk, because that's a big theme of this film, is like you think you can go and chase like the paranormal and you can go after like these stories and you have like the site of a halo of protection. I used to travel in just such dangerous ways.
I used to hitch II. You can do all these things, And looking back, I'm like.
Yeah, I absolutely had this like idea that I was protected somehow, And there is something to that as well, like that lens of some kind of privilege or some kind of invincibility.
That also has to do with youth, of course, like the folly of being in your early twenties.
Sure, but yeah, I think that that's kind of another lens of like the overconfidence certain groups in America myself, including.
Totally young white middle class yeah people.
Yeah right, yeah, And that's like so much of like what this movie shows feels just like experimental and possibly unintentional. Where I don't know that we've mentioned this yet, but originally the directors envisioned it being three men who were leading this movie. And it wasn't until how they're auditioned and gave an amazing audition that they were like, oh, actually we're going to put you at the center of
this movie. So so much of what is gendered about this movie is very possibly not a part of the original plan. But that's not to say that that doesn't come into the performances and into the editing and into the marketing and into the reception. It's just so bizarre and fascinating and the same thing of like it's the late nineties, So I don't know, but it's like I wonder how intentionally they were cast for Race for Appears.
I Mean, it's all kind of unclear, but it comes out just because of how the movie was shot and made and what it seems like the personal experiences of the actors were because so much of them had to go into the parts. Yeah, the America stuff. I was like, oh fuck, I totally forgot about that part of the movie. Wow, not them cultural commentarying at the turn of the Millennium.
No, Well, one of the things Heather says is when they're being like hunted in the woods and they don't really know who or what is hunting them, she says something like, well, they can't chase us forever because this is America where we've destroyed most of our natural resources, basically saying like, we're gonna run out of forest eventually and we will come upon the civilization.
Not even totally misguided thoughts, but come.
On, yeah, that would be my logic. If I was lost in the woods, I'd be like, well, if I just keep walking in a direction, there will be a road eventually.
But you never see the blur witch controlling the space time continuing. No one's ready.
For that exactly, And I love that they just throw in this little pinch of hillbilly horror where we have I believe Josh saying Oh my god, I think that there's like some redneck I can't remember what he says, but some rednecks fucking with us out in the woods, which I all say, so really, I'm into looking at horror movie through the lens of class and like that they're out in the woods and this is kind of the only place where these like scary, impoverished people live
who are gonna get you if you go into the woods. Again, like that like middle class college student, like a Deliverance type movie where it's like, oh, we're just gonna like canoe down this river because nothing bad will happen to us, even the way of like no real plan. And yeah, I think that that's another just like interesting American moment in the movie that we're kind of led to believe that could be a possibility at least.
And you can feel that in how the interviews go at the top of the movie as well, where there's especially when they come into contact with Mary Brown, which feels like a combination of they do not think she is of sound mind. I think they're also judging her
because she's poor and she's old. Yeah, and then also another time with the guys that are fishing, Like you can just even hear I don't know, like you can hear in Heather voice that she's like, I don't take these people seriously because they are poor and live rural.
Yeah, they're not listening to the Harbingers and there's like a bunch of them and they're just a you know, they're not listening to them at all, which is a you know, classic horror and a classic college student mistake.
Yeah, Josh even makes a reference to Deliverance because like that's the thing, like people's frame of reference for a lot of just what happens in life is the media they've consumed. And he's like, well, probably what's happening is that there are like people who live in the woods and they're the ones fucking with us.
Like in Deliverance, You're like, who do you think made that, Josh? Middle class white people you feel defice.
Similarly, I forget which character it's either Mike or Josh. They come upon that like makeshift cemetery and one of them says and it's just like a throwaway line of dialogue. It's not a plot point or anything like that. It's just like a they said something, and he says ooh, looks like an Indian burial ground, which is like, first of all.
We've also talked about on this show, which is just.
Like, yeah, an example of something scary or haunted being likened to indigenous history in some way. Where again, as we've discussed, so many horror movies attribute something very scary to a native burial ground being disturbed or a Native quote unquote curse of some kind, something like that that a character again just like makes a throwaway comment about.
I feel like there's also a similar moment, another throwaway line where they talk about like voodoo or like a I think they like see the stick figures and make a reference to how they're like voodoo dolls. We've also talked about this the way that Princess and the Frog, Yeah, that voodoo is widely misrepresented in media.
It's such a fascinating like time capsule of these very specific biases that still exist. But it's just like the way it's laid out in this movie is very natural because it basically is yeah, yeah.
And these biases are coming out, and like the acting, because they don't have a script, So I am assuming that Josh did not have a script that said this is an Indian burial ground. You should say something about this being an Indian burial ground. That's like just coming completely out of the influence that media has had on him completely. Yeah, which is just as interesting as a script. It's it's basically the same thing. It's still the writer slash actors bias being expressed.
Which I feel like those three actors should have been credited writers on the movie since it's all their dialogue, but they were not credited as writing the movie. The only credited writers are the two directors, Daniel Merrick and Eduardo Sanchez, who wrote that outline for the movie. So yeah, they conceived the story and the basic plot points, but it was the actors.
But like the most iconic moment of this movie was technically written by the actor formerly known as Heather Donihue. Those are her words.
I just wanted to point out two quick things. One is that speaking of like their biases just kind of coming through in the dialogue they're improvising. A few of them make some fat phobic in like body shaming comments. Also, one of the guys is filming Heather when she's trying to pee in the woods, which is very gross.
Illegal and they film her dirty butt, yeah, which is very friend evil friend behavior. I will say, not that it excuses it, but zooming in on someone's dirty butt rude. I'll make the controversial observation that it could happen to any of us.
It's classic comedy.
I would never do that. I would never film your dirty butt, Jamie. I just want you to know that Jamie would film me.
I might film your dirty but I don't know. I don't know. It depends on how dirty it is.
The ruth comes up, how.
Feisty I was feeling on that day.
But you wouldn't put it in them.
I wouldn't put it in the final cut, think, but I maybe send it to a group text.
Oh sure, fair? Yeah, does anyone have anything else?
Yeah?
I think that's good.
Yeah.
I think that this movie does pass the Baxel test.
It does.
Yeah. Between Heather and Mary Brown, yay. And if we knew the local that they're interviewing, who's like holding the toddler in her arms, if we knew her name, which.
It spiritually passes to me. Yeah, her real name is Susie Gooch, which is also like, okay, an incredible name. I'd love Susie Gooch.
I think it's also worth pointing out that there is no romance true at all in this movie, So there's actually no conversation at all about a man romantically. It's like the only girlfriend we have is Josh saying like, my girlfriend's gonna know I'm missing, and that's kind of like the only.
Line, Like we got that, Josh, we get it.
Does she live in Canada?
I read in the oral history that that was originally written into the outline was that Josh and had There had a romantic So it's like, you can't even hand it to the director because they originally wrote in that like Josh and had There had a romantic history. But then based on how the early improvised scenes were going, they're like, forget it cool because their relationship was becoming so friend antagonistic that they're like, let's just cut that
element and have you just react to each other. But yeah, they weren't above it, but it just was like a testament to the actors, like, I mean, it wasn't necessary either way, right, Definitely, their performance has made it clear.
Interesting, So yes to passing the Bechdel type, but onto the perfect metric. The Bechdel cast nipple scale, which is our scale where we rate the movie zero to five nipples based on examining it through an intersectional feminist lens. And I will give this ooh two and a half or three nipples just because I really like the character of Heather in that I appreciate that she feels so authentically human in the way that women are not often
allowed to be on screen. She's flawed and she has to deal with again what I interpret as implicit gender bias. Whether or not that was an intentional piece of the filmmakers or not, it is how I experienced the movie.
As I was watching it. Two men's treatment of her felt extremely familiar to me in that very kind of gendered way where totally they aren't coming out and saying it explicitly, but their behavior and just the way they interact with her and the way they do not really trust her at any point again felt as though they were harboring these sexist biases, and I think that's interesting to watch. And again, whether as intentional or not, it is there to me so and it's something I never
noticed until this watch of it either. But I also hadn't seen the movie since I was a teenager probably However, the lack of challenging of like the traditional witch narrative of oh, of course there was a witch who is evil because which is be evil murderers for no reason, that not being challenged at all, and that trope just
being fully leaned into. And you don't get much backstory or lore of the Blair Witch in this movie, but in the two sequels, and I think I didn't watch that documentary that you're both referring to, but it seems like there's more lore that is canon to the property and to the Blair Witch, that dives more into who the Blair Witch was and what she's all about. And again it's just like playing into those tropes of like woman equals which equals evil. So didn't care much for that.
So with that in mind, I think I'll give the movie two and a half nipples, and I'll give one to the actor formally known as Heather donaghue, and I'll give one to Mary Own, and then I'll give my half nipple to the woman who has the toddler, Yeah, who improvised Susy.
Gooch and famously now a corn.
Fan whose daughter is now a huge cornhead baby gooch a Corn Cob if you will, totally corn.
So yeah, that's my reading.
Yeah, I'm gonna go three. I really enjoyed getting to talk about this movie. This movie does so many things. I don't even really care if it's intentional or not, because it's like what we have and there's so few movies like it where it's like you're literally stressed testing late nineties white middle class biases just inherently to how this project was made. It's so interesting. I really I have a lot of love for the character Heather, and the actor formerly known as Heather Donahue, and all of
the actors. I mean, just like absolutely wild that they survived this experience. And again, whether intentional or not, the idea of like a woman controlling the narrative and having the narrative taken away from her after her death and also in the last day of her life, I think is really fascinating. And if it's a mistake, I don't care. It's fucking cool. And then there's all the less challenging part of this that we've talked about, of the presentation
of witches and how Heather's treated in certain moments. I think, honestly, the presentation of the Witch herself is the thing I have the biggest issue with because how had There's treated does feel like a part of that stress test, and it feels very relevant to how her character works out. And I think it's frustrating and fascinating that the apology scene is what most people remember from this movie because it is a scene that is credited as being written
by two men when it was not. It's a great piece of acting that was widely mocked for years, in years and years, and it kind of I think because it's famous, which is again, this isn't a fault of the movie, really, but I mean, like, let you sort of believe that Heather brought this on to herself and brought this on to her friends. Yeah, with the apology sort of being the thing that sticks with her. No, no one, It doesn't stick with anyone. That Mike's the
one that got rid of the map. It doesn't like the other characters. Accountability isn't what sticks with people. And so I just think the movie fucking rips hell, and I just really enjoy talking about it with you both. I'm going to give it three nips, and I'm going to give them all two Ray Hants aka the actor formerly known as Heather Donna Hugh looking forward to figuring out where I can buy her weed online.
I think she's out of the game now, sadly. Damn, she's just being a Buddhist now, which is rad and I would be too distressful history.
You're going to a balance, seriously, this has been your life, yeah, Chelsea, how about you? Ugh?
Okay, I think that one of the most interesting themes. And that makes me again like agree with you both really about the portrayal of the witch being the most egregious offense against like women. And I didn't actually mention this before, but there's a theme of blame, which we've talked.
About with Heather.
But then we can also look at the blame that was placed if we're looking outside of the movie, which I think is okay, because these things existed in kind of concert with each other. So it's like, yeah, it's
the Blair Witch Project. But a lot of people were on the website, a lot of people were watching the fake documentary, and you learn about Ellie Kenwick who is blamed by the town for the disappearances of children and then murdered, and then you also have Rust and Parr, the child murderer of the nineteen forties who is essentially considered to have been possessed by a woman. Right, So it's like we have this actual horrific murderer that did exist.
There's no lore.
It's like Rust and Parr existed, he killed children, they were found, but it's still somehow a woman's fault, like the map is somehow Heather's fault. Right, So there's this like theme of blame that isn't really analyzed in any way.
So let's see.
I mean, I think I'm going to go up to three because mostly because of my bias and being so in love and obsessed with this movie.
Heather, Mary Brown, Ellie Kedwick, hell Ya.
And you know what, maybe I'll give another Well now I can't give one for marketing, but I would just like to say the best marketing that has ever existed in any franchise period.
Like, yeah, completely impossible to replicate. Like it's just never again, so fucking cool, Never again, Chelsea, thank you so much for bringing this to us. I just like, there's no one I would rather talk about this movie with.
That's so nice.
I am so grateful that you asked me on and yeah, it was a joy ride for sure.
Of Hubris.
What a wonderful camping troop.
You know, in those Maryland woods. I'm from the Northwest, not as scary. Our woods are not as scary as those thin trees out there.
Oh it's so freaky. I want to go. So I guess we're camping, right.
I'm coin, I'm cone see you there.
Here's a quick little story to end the episode with. I grew up in the middle of the woods in rural western Pennsylvania. There was a local legend that is like in local history books about this ghost who was haunting people and then he manifested as this eternal flame and so the but this flame that like popped out of the ground one day was actually just like a pocket of natural gas that ignited maybe from lightning or something.
But this flame, this like or eternal flame, ghost flame, was right outside my house where like my dad built a little like well.
Yeah, sessed. So there's a shit.
Ghost story that existed on my property growing up.
Okay, your neighbor was the eternal flame.
Yeah, oh, it's like the legend of the burning Well, I'll look into it. I'll see if I can find anything. I was like, you have to talk to listen.
This is a great moment for self promo here.
This is American Hysteria has been doing a new project called the Urban Legends Hotline, and you go to our website Americanassria dot com and you can leave a message about an urban legend that you had growing up, and then we turn it into like a very detailed and very intensive episode. So I would love if you called in and talked about this ghost flame because I love it and you never know what you're gonna find. We analyze it through every possible lens, newspapers, dot com.
We're there.
I listened to the pig People episode. That was a hotline episode, right, Yeah it was.
It was cannibal pig people murdering teenagers. That's the kind of stuff you can find on our show.
Yeah, tell us all about your show where people can find it, etc.
Yeah, American Hysteria, you can find it anywhere you get your podcasts. And yeah, we cover the fantastical thinking of Americans, moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, crazes, anything that kind of stirs a large amount of people.
We try to cover.
So a lot of the shows are written narrative me describing talking, and we have clips.
You know, it's very multi media project.
And then we also have interview episodes with all kinds of cool guests talking about all kinds of cool topics.
So I hope you guys come and listen.
Hell yes, and thank you again for joining us. Come back anytime.
Please, yeah, just say the word.
You can follow us on social media at Bechtel Cast. You can somebscribe to our Matreon at patreon dot com slash Bechtel Cast, where you get two bonus episodes every single month, plus access to the back catalog of many many bonus episodes, all for five dollars a month.
And you can get our merch over at teapublic dot com slash the Bechtel Cast. And with that, let's go into the Freaky house and get gun.
I Dream.
I'm down. Bye bye,