THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT Almost a Different Ending
One of the greatest things about The Blair Witch Project was its simplicity. There were no big special effects and there was hardly any blood. The finale of the film simply featured a guy standing in the corner of a basement, and it was the most terrifying thing ever. I remember when I first saw the film the chills that it sent down my spine were intense. It was brilliantly effective filmmaking.
It's kind of funny to hear now that when Artisan Entertainment got a hold of the movie back in the late 1990s, the first thing that they wanted to change was that ending, which would have been a terrible mistake! During an interview with Bloody Disgusting at Denver’s Mile High Horror Film Festival, Blair Witch directors Dan Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez revealed what all went down. The article doesn't specify who said the following, but here's what thy revealed:
“Well, we wanted to show something more spectacular than what we ended up with. But we couldn’t come up with an idea and we had a limited budget, so it was going to have to be something really clever. We actually didn’t have the ending of the movie when we were filming. We started shooting the movie without the ending and I remember Gregg (Hale), our producer, would come in and be like, ‘Man, you got five days,’ and we would go back and think about it.
"…but we didn’t want to betray the rest of the movie. There are no real gags in the movie, we weren’t showing anything, you know, except a bundle of sticks and some teeth. And then maybe two or three days before we had to shoot the ending we came up with the idea…Artisan wanted to change it when they bought the movie. That was the first thing they wanted to do was change the ending."
They didn't specify what the studio wanted to change about it, but I'm glad they didn't. It's just an example of how the studio executives swoop in on movies like this to change things around. I imagine that if the ending was changed, they would have thrown some kind of cheesy looking Blair Witch character at the audience. We recently posted a video essay showing how The Blair Witch Project changed movies. In case you missed that you can watch it here.
I included a clip of the ending of the movie.