Rumor took hold amongst the crew that a witch had conjured the storms. An attempt to make land in Bermuda had failed due to crosswinds, “and the Ship grew daily more leaky almost to desperation and the Chiefe Seamen often declared their Resolution of Leaving her if an opportunity offered it Self….”(1) The passengers and crew grew more agitated as the ship weakened and the weather refused to yield. Choppy seas and violent winds plagued the Charity of London’s journey from the start. Travelers knew that the trip across the ocean was a dangerous endeavor, but this crossing proved particularly hazardous. Mary Lee was one such passenger, but she never set foot on Maryland’s shores. The Charity of London set sail for the New World in 1654 from England with her crew and small group of passengers looking to settle the new colony. The perilous waters of the Atlantic Ocean condemned Maryland’s first witch. Learn more about the Blair Witch’s connection to the Maryland Historical Society and Maryland’s other fabled witches in this reblog of a 2013 post, “Double, Double Toil and Trouble: Witchcraft in Maryland:”
#BLAIR WITCH WITCH MOVIE#
This time around, James Donahue, the brother of one of the missing documentarians, and his friends return to the dark and dangerous forest to find his long lost sister. The original movie briefly brought the Maryland Historical Society’s library collections into the Hollywood limelight when its faux documentary style convinced viewers of the veracity of the Blair Witch, as well as the existence of a rare book in the MdHS library that told the story of Kedward’s evil deeds. Maryland’s most famous witch, Elly Kedward, also known as the Blair Witch, returns to the big screen this Friday, September 16, in “Blair Witch,” the direct sequel to 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project.” “The Blair Witch Project” supposedly featured the footage left behind by three student filmmakers who disappeared after venturing into the Black Hills, a forest surrounding the tiny town of Burkittsville, formerly Blair, Maryland, to track down the murderous Blair Witch. No found footage movie has managed to recreate the success or impact of The Blair Witch Project, but that's because the entire subgenre basically only exists because of the 1999 release.Maryland’s most famous witch: The Blair Witch. The narrative device of an ambiguous found footage ending has been harnessed by everything from Paranormal Activity to Cloverfield to to the underrated The Houses October Built, but it was The Blair Witch Project that first mastered the trick of making viewers feel like watching the movie was the first act in their own personal horror story. This was, of course, hysteria, hype, and a bit of fun in the times when water-cooler conversations drove public interest before memes and hashtags, but it's a testament to just how successfully The Blair Witch Project's ending achieved its objectives. The ambiguity was pulled off with such aplomb that horror aficionados, none of whom were numb to the found footage genre's real-but-not tricks and tropes, legitimately questioned whether the whole release wasn't actually just part of the Blair Witch monster's curse – one to which they'd now succumbed just by watching it. The final shots of The Blair Witch Project left 1990s audiences leaving theaters with a genuine sense of unease (which is why it's still the best Blair Witch movie). Why Paranormal Activity Kickstarted The Found Footage Craze By now, the legendary status of The Blair Witch Project is undebatable, but the movie wouldn't have reached it without the ending. It was the first found-footage movie pertaining to the supernatural that genuinely had audiences questioning its status as fiction. Then, The Blair Witch Project came along and changed everything. The found footage format was used to attempt this with movies like Cannibal Holocaust and equally controversial The Faces of Death, but the conceit was always "how close to a snuff film can we make without actually making a snuff film", relying on visceral disgust more than creating fear from psychological realism. No amount of suspension of disbelief could convince an audience that a scripted, edited movie with a cast of actors in character was real on an emotional level (although as an honorable mention, The Exorcist came pretty close). As a medium, cinema struggled to recreate this magic. Fiction masquerading as fact has always been a staple of horror, even before movies – everything from campfire stories at summer camp to the letter correspondence format of Mary Shelly's 1818 classic Frankenstein relied on convincing the listener/reader that the horrifying events conveyed are real.
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