Back before my freshman year of high school a little independent film came out called The Blair Witch Project. I'd say most people hear the title of this movie and they groan, usually about how terrible it was, but before most people thought it was terrible, a lot of people thought it was amazing and absolutely ground breaking. I saw it the second day of limited release, back when people still thought it might be real due to the clever marketing campaign that just blatantly lied to people and said that it was found footage. I was probably the only person in the sold out theater who knew it wasn't real, but by the end of the movie I was scared shitless. I had just witnessed the most terrifying thing I'd ever seen in my life.

I think a lot of it was to do with the fact that my 14 year old mind had been heavily saturated with first person shooter games over the last four years, starting with Wolfenstein 3D for the SNES when I was 9, Doom for SNES when I was 10, Doom II for Windows 95 and Quake when I was 11 and so on. In short, I think my little brain was acclimated to seeing things in the first person perspective and being completely immersed in them, so when the final section of Blair Witch happened, and I was second to the front row so that the screen was the only thing I could see, and they started running through that house with the cameras as if they were their only eyes, it wasn't them in that house, it was me and what happened to them didn't happen to them, it happened to me.

I couldn't talk for a few hours after seeing it. When I got home I just laid down on my floor for a while. I couldn't even articulate in my head why I was so scared by it. It just moved me on some primal level, and I became an immediate fan.

I started up a website at BlairWoods.com and begun compiling all the information I could on the film. I hunted down interviews in magazines and newspapers, and slowly brought together all the information into one large dossier including how they found the actors, how much they paid them, what gear they used, how they used a pre-programmed GPS unit to move between checkpoints that the directors would stock with small amounts of food and secret notes for each actor on how they should behave. I still remember a lot of it: the actors were absolutely alone in the woods for days, by the end of the shoot they were living off an apple a day, seriously starving in order to make their performances more convincing, that they improvised certain things like when Mike threw the map away. A lot of this info is now on the wikipedia page for the movie.

The highlight of all this for me was that my website got mentioned in an article that was syndicated in newspapers around the country. I still have a copy of the Los Angeles Times with a reference to BlairWoods.com right on the front page of whatever section it was. Pretty cool for a 14 year old. The only downside was that I never had any sort of advertising on the website, this was back before Google got into the advertising business or was at all relevant. I remembered applying to be a part of UGO but they shot me down. Oh well.

This song was included on the faux-soundtrack for the movie called Josh's Blair Witch Mix which mostly sucked.

For the record, The Blair Witch Project is 5,000 times better than that Paranormal Activity bullshit with it's stupid generic horror movie The Ring-like bullshit ending.