THE AWFUL TRUTH
"So Is This Shit Real?"
The Reality Mini-FAQ: what's real and what's horseshit
THE AWFUL TRUTH
Special thanks goes out to THE URBAN LEGEND REFERENCE PAGES for their help with the micro-FAQ. These fuckers rock.
"So man, cut the crap. Is this story for real or what?"
In a word: no. This is probably one of the coolest tricks that the filmmakers pulled off with the movie: the smudging of the line between reality and fiction. It's sometimes hard to determine where the truth ends and the storytelling begins with a movie like this- and that's fucking genius. When you can get throngs of people wandering out of a horror movie scratching their heads saying "Jesus, was that shit real?"- congratulations, you've just fathered an honest-to-Zod urban legend. However, being the heartless Communist Thought Police that we are here at NOTC... we thought we'd bring the sledgehammer of reality crashing down on your nappy heads. So no, everything in the movie is make-believe. We'll elaborate in greater detail below...
"What about the disappearance of those three film students in the woods back in 1994? My cousin said that he remembered reading something in the paper about that big search party that went out looking for them."
Well, your cousin's full of shit. Three filmmakers never entered those woods and disappeared. The "news reports", "police search", and "interviews" on the website & the Sci-Fi special were all faked. It never happened. The footage in the film was not real and it was not a reconstruction of real events. Sorry: total bullshit there, buster.
"O.K. so no one ever disappeared up there.... but the whole legend of the Blair Witch thing... that's some real folklore from that part of the country, right?"
Wrong again. The entire "legend of the Blair Witch" is completely fabricated. All the carefully constructed timelines, records, and interviews with townsfolk & "historians"... are fakes. There is no Blair Witch legend. There never was. Hell, there never was a Blair to begin with, but Burkettsville is real.
"What about that weird old book they were talking about? You know, the one that talked about the murders on Coffin Rock? I thought I saw that shit on amazon.com the other day."
That creepy old book, THE CURSE OF THE BLAIR WITCH? Sorry, faker than a motherfucker. Of course, a "reproduction of the original 1800s text" will most likely turn up in bookstores pretty soon.
"O.K. but that serial killer bit.... it's true, right? I know for a fact that part was legit. My grandfather's best friend was one of the seven kids to get murdered back in the 1940s!"
Bitch, your grandpa's best friend died on Iwo Jima when he took a shit on a Japanese land mine and it blew his own unit to hell. Truth is, there never was a creepy old hermit who "ritualistically disemboweled" local children in his mountain shanty around Burkittsville (or anywhere else, for that matter) from 1940-1941 at the behest of a female ghost.
"But wasn't there a serial killer who did that same routine? I mean, made one kid stand in the corner while he killed the other ones? That was patterned after a real-life guy, like John Wayne Gacy or Jeffery Dahmer... right?"
To our knowledge, no.
"The characters in film, who are they?"
Shockingly enough, the three actors in the film used their real names for their characters. Heather, Mike, and Josh really DO exist. They're just normal people who lucked out and landed really cool roles in a independent horror film.
"Now where was the movie filmed at? That stuff was all fake too, right?"
To our knowledge, the physical locations used in the movie... outside of Burkittsville Maryland, are real. The woods where they shot this movie are very real indeed.. and no doubt there will be some people who are packing their camping gear as we speak to head out there (along with the small group of wackos who are going to go scare the shit out of them). So yes, you can actually camp out in the same terrifying locations seen in THJE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT... at your own risk, of course.
"What about that run down old they used at the end of the movie?"
You're gonna love this... YES, that creepy old house in the woods DOES EXIST. The paint job and carvings were mock-ups of course... but they're probably still there on the walls if you're brave (or stupid) enough to go hunt that place down.
"O.K. fuck that, I'm there dude! So how do I get there?"
Because we're so pimp, we went through the trouble of downloading the
maps that lead to Burkittsville, Maryland. Here they are:
"The movie seems so believable. Sort of like an episode of THE REAL WORLD... but with more satanic killings. How did they manage to accomplish this, especially without Puck?"
The film seems incredibly realistic because for the most part.... it is real. The three "actors" were simply given packs of supplies, some rudimentary story/character notes, and a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracker- and then turned loose in the woods to film whatever they came across with the cameras. A lot of the reactions of the cast are legitimate, because they had no previous knowledge of what they would find out in the woods (like the stones, stick figures, body parts, etc. that were all planted by the crew). There was no real "script" per se for the actors to follow. They simply ad-libbed the majority of their scenes in the woods. Pretty fucking cool, huh?
