r/BlairWitch

When I first watched this movie, my initial impression was that it was a cheap, Hollywood cash grab sequel, quickly cobbled together to bank off the success of the first movie. I didn't know who Joe Berlinger was (although I would really come to appreciate his work with the Metallica doc) and I didn't know enough about the mythology to understand the subtle references to the first movie and subsequent documentaries. For example, I didn't know that the hospital scenes where Jeff is getting fed some liquid through is nose was a reference to the documentary about Kyle Brody. I just thought it was a gross out shock moment. I didn't catch the reference to Rustin Parr when Kim is in the store and the old guy looks at her and says "I'm finally finished" or later when she swerves off the road after seeing the seven children. When I first watched the movie, all of those moments just went over my head and I just shrugged all of it off as being pointless, "jump scare" moments.

Now when I watch the movie, I still don't think its great but I enjoy it a lot more now for what it is. It might be one of the most "meta" movies ever made, before people started using that term. I remember watching the Joe Berlinger commentary over the movie and him lamenting about how the producers ruined his vision for the film. He hated the random violence being spliced into the earlier parts of the movie, and I don't blame him. Those parts are really annoying. He had a really cool idea to make a movie that was self-referential but not copying of the first movie and that's not what Artisan/Lionsgate wanted. They wanted a movie like what we got in 2016. I'll get to that movie later down the line, but for now I'm interested in hearing what the group here has to say about BoS.

I started playing the game days ago and I have already 1) collected first 2 carved wooden doll 2) kill monsters with flash light 3) didn't break any totem hanging from the tree 4) pet bullet often, commanded him to stay close to me.

https://preview.redd.it/cdub7gb3jijh1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=4fcc7a9da4ef1d4900b8db3b458890823acd3fab

10/10

The internet wasn’t what it is today, and I didn’t even have a laptop or PC back then. Smartphones didn’t exist. It was a completely different world.

I was 18, living in Europe (Netherlands) with my parents and my brothers. We watched it on VHS in 2000, and I remember being so disturbed and scared because I genuinely thought it was real footage, lol.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I was lying there under the covers, scared shitless, saying my prayers, 😂.

And I even remember that the next day — in broad daylight, mind you — I was still scared when I went to return the VHS to the video store. I kept jumping at the slightest sound. 😂

Looking back, it’s actually crazy how effective the whole “this is real” marketing was. Without smartphones, social media, or the internet being as ubiquitous as it is today, it was much easier to believe something like that. Right??

Who else remembers being genuinely terrified by it when they first saw it?

What do you think is a better release in terms of the features and the extra contents of the physical media? Kinda torn that the LG does not have the 2+ hour documentary and that 90-minute deleted scenes.

I watched the extended 4 hour plus cut of the movie on you tube. I later came to know this is a fan made edit taken from the second sight release deleted scenes and parts of the version that was shown at Sundance. I also read that the version on you tube is not the proper version but it was allegedly taken from the original creator of the extended version who published it to download on the blair witch . Net site. Anyway i loved it and I believe any fan of the movie should watch it at least once, apparently it also got updated so there is multiple versions which keep adding new material and it also includes the curse of the Blair witch mockumentary. Anybody else want to add their thoughts on it and if it actually improves the original or degrades it's quality?

Hi folks.

Following on from my recent “The Sentient Forest Theory Revised” post from a few days ago which you can view on my profile I decided tonight to tackle one aspect of our good friend & pillar of the community Mr Parr.

I haven’t seen this massive contradiction ever mentioned before but there seems to be a consensus that Rustin Parr built that house in the woods amongst the townsfolk who gossiped about him and as listed on the “Blair Witch Fandom” website.

Rustin Parr was strictly a Carpenter by trade, taught by his Uncle in their woodworking shop. It was his sole vocation. The Parr house was fairly deep in the woods and there was no access or dirt road linking it to main roads unlike the real life Grigg’s House it was based on. So how was it built there? Would Rustin have used horses & wagons to transport supplies? Rustin could probably build a roof and the stucco covered walls, but masonry? The foundations? The stone basement? The brick chimney and fireplace?

Some of the larger structural support beams from that time period could weigh hundreds of pounds. It seems unlikely that one man could have built it alone.

I’m not arguing that Parr couldn’t have renovated it only that he didn’t build it from scratch as I’ve seen the “Blair Witch Fandom” website claim he built a 3 storey house in 5 years.

Anyone here that can fill me in on if a Carpenter in Rustin’s time period would have an extensive, broader and less specialised range of skills that would crossover into stonemasonry and enable such a construction?

Following on from that when Heather & Mike entered the house did you see any furniture, crockery, toilet, paint, wallpaper, food, beds or mattresses? It was fully hollowed out and decaying with a crumbling fireplace, peeling paint, missing walls and in one room almost the whole floor was missing with just some beams showing. The floor was literally rotted enough to collapse.

How could this be possible if Rustin had built it 4-5 years earlier? If the structure had been that bad when he first arrived there would have been little point in renovating a structure that compromised.

Looters who vandalise don’t cause deeply rotted wood that’s been breathing damp forest air for decades nor can they be held responsible for paint peeling off the walls in that manner.

If we assume it was built around roughly 1850 like the Grigg’s House that means it would have been sitting there rotting for 90 years with no upkeep. It may be worth bearing in mind that in 1886 Robin Weaver the girl from the infamous Coffin Rock Massacre said to Bill Barnes, the Burkittsville historian from the Historical Society, when she was 50 and he was a young boy;

“I saw a woman whose feet never touched the ground and she took me to an old house back in the woods and took me into the basement. The woman left me there and said she would be back.”

She then told Bill “I got scared, crawled through a window, escaped and headed back to town.” Not too long after the search party was found dead.

If it was old in her eyes then that could very well predate it from 1886 significantly with the same basement & foundation but a totally different structure above it.

This leads me to believe that the house was originally near the edge of the forest built by someone else around the Mid 19^(th) Century or possibly earlier and that the forest pulled it inwards. Also, based on Robin’s wording to Bill it doesn’t sound like Robin described a long confusing journey. I’m not saying the forest increases its size, I think like a planet of great mass it yoinks historically significant nodes towards it and that the house was closer to town when Robin was a child.

This is speculation on my part but what if this house had its roots in the very founding of Blair in 1734? What if it was the very first house built there? If a frontier civilisation were to start building somewhere it’s conceivable that one of its more substantial buildings could have been built on solid stone foundations a few hundred yards from the woods where they could easily get wood for fire and water from the creek.

In “Curse of the Blair Witch” David Mercer the Anthropology Professor of Maryland University describes the Colonial era foundation they dragged the rucksack of tapes out from under. What is less clear is if this is the same structure that belonged to the Parr house although there are multiple statements he makes that leads me to believe they are one and the same.

Mercer stated in his police interview that the wall must have been at least 150 years old. According to the deed for the house (Blair Witch Dossier by DA Stern) it was first built when Burkittsville was incorporated in 1824 which was the Federal era yet here we have a Professor of Anthropology identifying the foundation as Colonial (Pre-1776) and what was left of the cabin as a Civil War (1860’s) Way Station for the Underground Railroad with a passageway in the basement.

Mercer’s words “The passageway must have led all the way down to the creek at one point. The creek feeds down into the Potomac. Bill Barnes over at the Historical Society told me a bunch of stories concerning the movement of a great number of slave children and their mothers.”

For those who don’t know a Way Station was a hiding spot for slaves and in this particular one they could come and go through the secret underground passageway that led to the river without being seen from the road.

It would have been a place that absorbed feelings of intense fear.

Lethal force against slave fugitives was authorised in Maryland and even if they weren’t killed they would likely be sold to the Deep South which was a death sentence in its own right due to the punishing conditions.

As a Professor, Mercer’s opinion holds weight, even though he’s not an Archaeologist he doesn’t seem to be confused or lacking confidence in what he describes.

He was there to supervise digging around that property before the discovery.

Mercer said “The original house at the site had burned down and so there was a layer of ash sitting in the interior of the house like the basement. So this napsack had been in sterile soil with no evidence around it of disturbance and over the top of it was an undisturbed layer of ash.”

This is still the same building that he described there being a partial passageway in.

When you put all this together it very closely resembles the state you would expect to see the Parr estate in upon the 1995 tape discovery.

On another note the students involved in the dig described it as being “deep in the woods” to police while a Park Ranger describes it as an area of forest not far from the main trail.

I guess people have very different perceptions of distance inside the forest or perhaps the distance actively changes in the person’s mind depending on anxiety levels.

If the building existed back then and for whatever reason was abandoned the forest could then move in to claim it. Moving fractions of an inch per year while inhabited so they don’t notice and then fully gaining control of it the second it’s abandoned. This would also explain it being moved if it fell into disuse after the Civil War ended.

Once again, it’s been a pleasure to research and write this and I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have. Any thoughts or discussion are welcome!