Here's a question that may not have been answered yet...
Is The Blair Witch Project (1999) real in this film? Have the characters in this movie seen the footage of Heather, Mike, and Josh, or has that not been discovered in this universe?
I saw the film, and noticed that they never confirm or deny having seen the original footage, but have the filmmakers said anything about it?
Thanks!
It was mentioned in the movie that the footage from Heather's expedition was found. It didn't mention anything about it getting a theatrical release, but it was certainly well-known.
Thit and thpin!
I wondered the same thing throughout this movie and it confused me. I think the writers deliberately made it ambiguous so as not to restrict themselves.
shareI was wondering the same thing. According to the official Blair Witch timeline that the writers of the first movie published, it is known that the families were shown select pieces of the footage by law enforcement and eventually it was all turned over to them when the legal limit of its classification ran out, at which point Angie Donahue contracted Haxan films to piece it all together to make "The Blair Witch Project". However, this film never alluded to a theatrical release.
We can infer James saw it either way since he is family member of Heather's, but then again he would have been a little kid when the footage was discovered. I don't think his family would have let him view it at such a young age, but maybe they let him watch it when he was older and curious. I think he mentioned recognizing the stick figures from Heather's footage. Lane and Talia also knew about the stick figures though, so maybe the theatrical release does exist...
Melissa: Is there an F5?
Reactions around the room:
i figured they had...partly why they were so fast to NOPE after seeing totems the first time. they knew what they were
shareI don't think it matters that they didn't explain. It would have been the same outcome. I think we can assume it was released to the general public. It makes it all the more scarier that people don't venture into the woods even with the popularity of the myth.
shareIt makes it all the more scarier that people don't venture into the woods even with the popularity of the myth
The Blair Witch Project (1999) has to have been real in this film.
In the beginning of this film, Lisa (the documentarian) provides some expository information about Heather Donahue and the documentary that she and her crew shot--and then this film's "editor" uses (what appears to be) actual footage from the first movie's final scene.
The first film claims, in the very beginning, that the film that you are about to watch is from footage that was found in the woods. The fact that it has been released is implied through text that implicates you, the reader/viewer, as the audience. It's the whole conceit of the film.
(Also consider: how else would "the editor" of Blair Witch (2016) have had the footage from the 1999 film if The Blair Witch Project weren't in wide release?)
And this is why Book of Shadows acknowledges The Blair Witch Project (1999) was fiction from the get-go...because otherwise a "sequel" would make no sense. Everyone knows it was fiction; and we, the audience, can no longer be implicated as part of the "documentary."
This fact is what makes Blair Witch (2016) COMPLETELY NONSENSICAL, since again, everyone knows (including the characters in this film) that the original Blair Witch Project was fiction. The whole idea of Heather's brother looking for his sister whom the entire world knows is a character in a fictional film is ridiculous.
After all, a group of millennials (one of whom has a search alert set up for...what, exactly?..."Black Hills witch"?) who have more than $30,000 worth of high-tech equipment (one of which is a drone) haven't done a Google search for "Blair Witch" or "Heather Donahue" and stumbled upon this very IMDb site?
We're not talking suspension of disbelief here. We're talking straight-up logical contradictions.