blair witch project analysis

The Blair witch project analysis

The 1999 horror hit the Blair witch project has a very strong emphasis on foreshadowing throughout the film, right from the beginning. Good foreshadowing would work very well in our horror, as it would let us vaguely show what will happen to our character without being explicit enough to take away from the shock value of later events.

The first piece of foreshadowing occurs when the 3 college students (heather, josh and mike) are interviewing residents of the town of burkittsville about the Blair witch. One man talks of rustin Parr, who claimed the Blair witch forced him to kill 7 young children in 1940’s. He would take them to his house in the woods, take 2 down to the basement and make one of them face the corner of the room while he killed the other. These events foreshadow multiple events later in the film. The largest is the fact that heather and mike end up going to a house in the woods during the films thrilling climax, where heather enters the basement after mike and finds him standing in the corner of the room. She is then presumably killed. The deaths of the 7 children are represented during the students second day in the woods, where they uncover a cemetery with 7 cairns in it. Each cairn represents one of the dead children. One of the cairns is knocked over by josh, which heather rebuilds as a sign of respect. Josh’s reckless actions foreshadow later events, as when the student’s tent is attacked in the night; and on return only josh’s items have been covered in a blue slime. Everybody else’s has strangely been untouched. This has effectively marked him as the first of the three to go missing, and presumably die.

After the students camp for the second night in the woods after failing to locate their car and hear strange cracking noises coming from all around there tent. They wake up the next day to find 3 cairns built around there campsite which weren’t present when the camp was built. There is cairn for each of them, and they represent there impending deaths. Later on, the students discover an area of woods filled with dozens of wooden stick figures hanging from the trees, which scares them considerably. A larger variant of these figures can be seen towards the end of the film, on the outside of the abandoned house. The stick figures in the forest symbolize danger or death, and as they appear between the students and the house near the films climax, they are a warning to not progress any more. The large stick figure on the house near the end of the film foreshadows the death of those who enter it, in this case heather and mike. To add evidence to this theory, as heather enters the house, what appears to be a hangman’s noose can be seen hanging from the wall next to the doorway. This too can be a foreshadow of death. It can also be interpreted as symbolizing that this is the house of Rustin Parr, the child killer who was hanged, and who claimed he was possessed by the witch.

Blair witch ending
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMQQpmm5u3w

(stick figure sign can be seen at 0:14 and 0:40)
(noose on wall can be seen at 1:00 to 1:04)

  One morning heather finds a bundle of sticks outside of her tent. It is wrapped with josh’s bandana and contains lots of blood and what appears to be teeth and a tongue, presumably josh’s. This symbolizes the presence of the witch. I've concluded this due to the information the students gather near the beginning of the film where they’re told “In 1825, eleven eye witnesses claimed a pale woman's hand dragged a little girl into a creek. For thirteen days after the drowning, the creek is clogged with oily bundles of sticks. The bundle heather finds is similar to the ones in the story. The oily substance is the blue slime that was put on josh’s items. These 2 things point to the witches presence, and ultimately to their demise.