Morbid Alternate Endings Revealed For THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT
I remember seeing The Blair Witch Project and being completely overcome with terror during the final minutes of the film. Then it ended with that shot of Michael standing in a corner of a creepy basement and that image chilled me to the bone. I don't know what it was, but that was just a creepy-ass visual that freaked me the hell out.
During a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, directors Dan Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez talked about the ending of the film and how it came about. They also reveal the gruesome alternate endings that they ended up ditching. Myrick said:
"There needed to be some kind of what-the-f–k moment at the end, but at the same time we didn’t want to see a person in a bad witch costume come out and grab them."
Sanchez goes on to add that they didn't have any money for special effect, so they had to get creative. They also really hoped that whatever they came up with wouldn't ruin the film.
"We didn’t have any money, so we couldn’t do any special effects so we had to figure out how to end it without ruining the rest of the film. We came up with the idea three days before we shot it. We thought it was great—kind of unexplained, but it gave you the idea that something supernatural was happening."
After the film was picked up by Artisan at Sundance, they started holding test screening to gauge audiences reactions and many of the audience members were left "overwhelmingly confused". Myrick went on to explain:
"We went back to that house with a skeleton crew and basically just shot all the endings that Ed and I threw out when we were dreaming up the script."
Those ending included "Mike hanging from a noose, crucified on a wooden stick man, and with a bloodied chest." All of those would've been interesting endings, but I thought the one they ended up with was perfect. When talking about how that came about Sanchez said:
“There was one additional pick up. We shot an interview with a guy where he explains a little bit of the mythology of the killer Rustin Parr; how he would make one kid stand in the corner while he killed the others. We felt that if we stuck it in early in the movie there was going to be some audience members that would connect it to the ending.”
So that's what they ended up using and it was an efective way of scaring the hell out of people!