Book Review: The Blair Witch Project Dossier

Book Title: The Blair Witch Project: a Dossier

Author: D.A. Stern

Date: 1999

Publisher: Onyx / Penguin

Length: 191 pages

ISBN: 0451199669

Illustrations: lots of black-and-white movie clips and graphics

Quote: "Three years after student filmmakers Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard disappeared in the forests of Maryland's Black Hills, law-enforcement authorities finally released all of the evidence..."

The forests of Maryland's Black Hills? Say whaaat? The Blue Ridge foothills of western Maryland aren't called "Black Hills." The Black Hills are in the Dakotas. That's your clue. The Blair Witch Project was a fictional horror movie filmed in flat, suburban Montgomery and Prince Georges County, where forested stream banks were cleverly faked into an imaginary wilderness. The movie looks as if it were a serious investigation of historical events. It's not. It's an elaborate fake.

Newspapers clued residents of suburban Maryland in to the production of this movie, and since it really was being made by imaginative local young people, everyone seemed to be in on the joke and enjoy cooperating with it.

Here are a few fun facts about Maryland that may contribute to your enjoyment of the book version of the story:

(1) "Blair" is the name of an old Montgomery County family. Blair House, the official White House guest house, is named in their honor. So is Montgomery Blair High School, which some participants in the movie attended.

(2) The idea of a "Blair Witch" was inspired by the authentic legend of Tennessee's "Bell Witch," actually a poltergeist reported by various members of a real Bell family. Several books have been written about the Bell Witch legend. The Blair Witch story is not based on the Bell Witch story.

(3) Montgomery College is a real community college, which the real filmmakers attended.

(4) In Bladensburg there really is a house made into a church that used to be identified by a sign advertising "GOD'S FINAL CALL AND WARNING, INC."

(5) What Montgomery County has in the way of hills are mostly stream banks. Two of the prettiest streams are the sections of the Sligo and Long Branch Creeks that define the neighborhood that includes Columbia Union College as "Between the Creeks." During the years when The Blair Witch Project was being written and filmed, each of "the Creeks" was maintained as a park with footpaths, picnic tables, and playground equipment, and lots of benign neglect of the pretty wildflowers and trees in between the playgrounds. The "wilderness" areas in the movie were filmed in those neglected spaces...a "wilderness" that harbored songbirds, house pets, and some imaginative students--and, because it's a playground for rich and influential people, has also been the scene of kidnappings and murders. 

If you enjoy horror movies this homegrown movie, and the related books, will chill, thrill, and amuse you. I enjoy them, not as horror, but as nostalgia and fun.