163 - The Blair Witch Project (feat. Tim Sutton)
Added 2024-11-06 07:00:09 +0000 UTCTim Sutton (Marble Hornets) joins the lads for a bit of light camping and intense witch-hunting as they cover Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s 1999 horror phenomenon: The Blair Witch Project. Topics include the film’s DIY filmmaking, the unprecedented marketing, and what it means to reap the consequences of a nation’s wrongdoings when you’re just trying to make a dang student film.
Tim Sutton: Twitter // Instagram
Marble Hornets: Youtube
Media Referenced in this Episode:
The Blair Witch Project. Dir. Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick. Haxan Films. 1999
Curse of the Blair Witch. Dir. Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick. Haxan Films. 1999.
8 Days in the Woods: The Making of The Blair Witch Project by Matt Blazi.
The Blair Witch Project: The Dossier by D.A. Stern. Onyx Publishing. 1999.
The Blair Witch Project: An Oral History by Scott Meslow. The Week. January 13th, 2015.
TWOAPW theme by Brendan Dalton: Patreon // brendan-dalton.com // brendandalton.bandcamp.com
Interstitial: “1:49 AM on November 3rd, 2024” // Written And Performed by A.J. Ditty // “Brothers on a Hotel Bed” Piano Cover by Stephen Guilbert
Comments
At day camp in 1999 we did a Blair Witch parody without having seen the movie, and we 100% did have people sneak in and out during camera moves
Stevie McFly
2025-05-02 14:38:36 +0000 UTC"Improv in the Woods" sounds like a badly translated European porno or a 15 dollar indie game on Steam
Noblesse Oblahaj
2024-11-26 17:29:24 +0000 UTCExcellent rec.
Kyle Cassidy
2024-11-23 04:47:46 +0000 UTCI spend all my time outside my day job volunteering at an immigration law clinic. Hearing AJs intermission was like a gut punch, and I've been feeling that way since last week. Y'all wouldn't believe, or maybe you would, the Facebook messages and comments we get. I field them all, use Chat GPT to cook up responses that are appropriate for a 501(c)(3). I've been passively suicidal for three years and I know that the slightest exposure to news media right now would put me in the hospital. So I don't seek it out. I don't want to see his face or their hatred given license by the popular vote. You guys do great work. It helps.
Josh James
2024-11-13 21:48:48 +0000 UTCFor some of the best found footage ever created, I recommend pretty much anything by Koji Shiraishi. His most well known movie is Noroi, and that's probably his most mainstream movie, but if you're down with really low budget movies, Cult and Occult and his Senritsu Kaiki Files series are all amazing. And if you watch and enjoy all (or any) of those, check out Welcome to the Occult Forest which...brings them all together (?)...not sure how to explain it, but it's great.
Kevin Smith
2024-11-11 21:37:52 +0000 UTCThe obvious solution to the daylight savings conundrum is that we just do everything an hour later in winter and an hour earlier in summer. Basically, we just continue doing what we're doing without the magic trick of pretending time itself has jumped.
Wilko
2024-11-10 14:13:55 +0000 UTCGreat episode, unbelievably good interstitial (thank you AJ). I was the demographic for Blair Witch - at uni (in Australia) in 1996 there was a girl who always wore a "Blair Witch Project" t-shirt, fuck knows where she got it. No one had any idea what it meant until a couple of years later when I suddenly went "oh, holy shit where did she get that t-shirt I wonder?" Anyway, I watched it on a sketchy pirated copy around 1999 I think, and fell asleep about 15min in - never watched it again. Sounds like I should check it out again though.
Adam Kelly
2024-11-09 02:54:41 +0000 UTCAJ waiting an hour to pay off mare witch project was maybe his most diabolical act to date
Robert Heilman
2024-11-08 19:29:37 +0000 UTCAnyway you want real found footage realplayer lost media look up CITY OF DREAMS which lasted until 2007 and probably still has YouTube uploads. Got some heavy hitters working on that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXBHOfdYmSU
John Leavitt
2024-11-08 05:07:54 +0000 UTCI am the exact right demographic this movie targeted, film nerd high schooler with access to the internet whose only information about it was QuickTime trailers and hearsay, oh is it real? A documentary? A convincing fake? Anyway there was a packed out in my small town theatre when it played cause of buzz and at the end everyone just kind of …wandered out, shell shocked. It kind of felt like we just watched a snuff movie cause it not being real hadn’t really filtered into media yet. The corrective was of course worse, a solid year of parodies and satires and take offs that robbed it of any sting it had. I watched it again a few years ago and was annoyed by how easily I was taken in by now obvious reality TV tactics. Whatever. The movie was a gun you could only fire once.
John Leavitt
2024-11-08 05:02:57 +0000 UTCMan, that 90s pigeon internet was rough. They hadn't really worked the kinks out until '99¹ and the solution wasn't widely adopted til like '07 [1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549 IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service
Ijon Tichy
2024-11-08 04:07:07 +0000 UTCAlso, a streaming site I peruse when something's not on Netflix just added 12 animated Adventures in Odyssey specials. I think the curse is spreading.
John Her
2024-11-08 02:12:35 +0000 UTCThis week is so fucked up that I welcomed AJ’s Horse Corner AND the Mare Witch Project as friends.
Max
2024-11-07 23:49:25 +0000 UTCLove the podcast but I think the episode might have mildly cursed me. This is the 4th time I've tried to listen but I keep falling asleep at the 1h mark. Then I wake up and repeat this loop the next day. Even invaded my dream this time I think
John Her
2024-11-07 22:17:39 +0000 UTCSometimes I act in my friend’s experimental plays where she gives us a vague script and just tells us to go with no actual lines. It’s fun and kind of panic-inducing and I always worry if it will look bad. The thing about the lady who completely made up her own story and told her daughter it wasn’t true is the coolest thing I’ve heard in a while.
Elizabeth Power
2024-11-07 17:57:56 +0000 UTCThe first time I saw this film, it's 2012. I'm a freshman in college, crammed into a dorm room with ten other 18 year olds. Crowded around a CRT TV, using what I assume to be the last working VHS player in 2012, and a $1 VHS tape we found at a most likely now closed independently-owned store that probably had every piece of physical media ever created (god it was so cool), in a most likely now closed mall (just looked it up, they tore it down this year. Rip 😔). A transcendent experience, to be clear.
Ms. Charlie
2024-11-07 17:16:35 +0000 UTCdang, do I remember realplayer! I always remember using it to wa-*BUFFERING*
CHO Feskatch
2024-11-07 03:27:06 +0000 UTCBlair Subscription Project
Nick Gully
2024-11-07 02:42:14 +0000 UTCI’m from Maryland and it’s so important to know that “Blair” comes from how the MD accent pronounces “Bel Air,” a real town near Baltimore
A Gaggle of Geckos
2024-11-06 21:10:46 +0000 UTCI needed that interstitial. Not American, but a fair number of my loved ones are and I'm doing all I can to keep them going in this right now. The darkness has hit, and I'll be fucked if I'm not doing all I can to get them to the light again.
Peter Larkin
2024-11-06 19:37:58 +0000 UTCStone Mountain was a vacation spot for my family 🙃 The laser shows were kind of fun I guess.
Dergon
2024-11-06 19:27:27 +0000 UTCThe break... oh my God that was beautiful. Thank you guys for that, especially today
Mulloy
2024-11-06 19:09:55 +0000 UTCFirst part of this intermission feels a bit like suicide JOI
rachel alday
2024-11-06 14:51:40 +0000 UTCThe interstitial made me cry. It still feels like night
Fall
2024-11-06 13:55:30 +0000 UTCThe potential for Tik Tok and other short forms to be a good medium for found footage is…fraught. A few years ago there were some shorts posted by an account (seemingly) owned by a man called Andrew Dawson about seeing a giant in the Canadian wilderness, after which he put up a few more videos suggesting he was being hunted by government forces and then, possibly died. The death being real or fake is very unclear, and the videos immediately fell into full on earnest conspiracy circles. If the creator meant for this to be fun fiction you couldn’t blame him for not wanting to be involved any more, it could be that it was intended as fiction and the death was a coincidence, or he might have been a paranoid man who believed in giants. In whatever case the whole thing is distinctly grim, and not a fun internet fiction. I think that’s much more of a risk with the current state of the internet, it’s hard to be absurd enough that some people won’t think it’s real, and those people are often horrifyingly fanatical.
Amy Godliman
2024-11-06 12:30:27 +0000 UTCI like the idea of an alternate timeline where the big influential found footage movie that took off was the zero budget Vietnam War picture 84C Mopic (1989)
BarFly
2024-11-06 12:17:56 +0000 UTCYou guys ever seen Butterfly Kisses? Pretty good contemporary spin on TBWP; E. Sanchez makes a little meta cameo as himself, discussing found footage movies, in the mockumentary frame story.
Kyle Cassidy
2024-11-06 07:21:37 +0000 UTC
