Daniel Myrick
95 connections found
Filmography
View:
Connections, in both directions
This feature—like Blair Witch Project, Chronicle, and Cloverfield before it—makes an evocative case for the genre…
Like the aforementioned Creep or The Blair Witch Project — both of which evidently haunt Parsons’ search history — Backrooms is terrifying at face value, especially when framed as faceless found footage…
…it’s something like The Blair Witch Project spliced with Cube blended with Synecdoche, New York, mostly shot in liminal spaces lit in queasy mono-yellow.
Much of the film thrives on its atmosphere, leaning into a lo-fi, analog horror aesthetic that clearly draws inspiration from early found footage staples like “The Blair Witch Project” and “Paranormal Activity,” while filtering those influences through the sensibilities of the creepypasta generation.
It feels like a mild rip off of “The Blair Witch Project” (1999) without the follow up frenzy?
…first person perspective is reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project…
The Last Exorcism (2010)
Directed by Daniel Stamm
influenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Visuals Plot
Like The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2009) before it, The Last Exorcism employs the very effective "fake documentary" format.
Thereâs certainly plenty of otherwise freaky behavior on display, but until its final moments itâs the most grounded found-footage flick since 1999âs The Blair Witch Project.
And while the mockumentary structure that seemed so terrifyingly fresh in 1999’s The Blair Witch Project has been overused by low-budget filmmakers, it works beautifully in The Last Exorcism; by filtering events through a single perspective, the filmmakers can reveal information at their own deliberate pace.
But assuming that they haven't seen either "The Blair Witch Project" (1999) or last year's "Paranormal Activity"?
It borrows conceptually from the brilliant no-budget mock-documentary “The Blair Witch Project” (1999) and the slightly less brilliant “Paranormal Activity” (2009) without any of the intelligence or humanity the makers of those films displayed.
The Ritual (2017)
Directed by David Bruckner
influenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Plot Themes Visuals
Though the plot recalls The Blair Witch Project, the film it most resembles stylistically is the superb The Descent.
There’s more than one way to die in the woods, although so far as horror-film narratives in that vein go, “The Blair Witch Project” has cast a bit too pervasive a shadow for nearly two decades now.
However, this control of style isn't enough to shake off The Blair Witch Project's shadow, especially during an intense tent-based episode, and the resolution serves to demonstrate how successfully the first Blair film channelled the chill of the unseen.
There are echoes of The Blair Witch Project without the found footage tropes and the use of symbols of folk ritual of an alien culture make the audience squirm a bit with discomfort.
And The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), especially once the friends encounter a strange symbol carved on a tree.
This feels like a subtle knock at The Blair Witch Project , the genre precursor that this film most resembles, and which was set in a strip of Maryland forest through which the Appalachian trail passes.
Paranormal Activity (2007)
Directed by Oren Peli
influenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Visuals Plot Themes
Like horror classics ranging from Cat People (1942) to The Haunting (1963) to The Blair Witch Project (1999), it suggests its terrors rather than explicitly showing them, which leaves far more to the imagination and sends more genuine chills up the spine.
That's even less than “The Blair Witch Project,” the breakout hit from 1999 that “Paranormal Activity” will be most compared to -- for obvious reasons, though “Paranormal” is the scarier of the two.
Comparisons to The Blair Witch Project aren't entirely off base, either, in that Paranormal Activity is about a decade past its sell-by date with a tale of irritating technophilia that would have felt more current in the Y2K Ludditism of 1999 than it did in the resigned technocracy of 2009--explanation in part for why it's already out of the conversation and never stirred much outrage or controversy when it was causing audiences of teens to collectively fake-shudder the way festival audiences collectively fake-cathect.
It has been dubbed a phenomenon and compared to the 1999 low-budget sleeper hit The Blair Witch Project.
Granted, the movie is less inspired or original than The Blair Witch Project in its conjuring of offscreen spaces and forces, potent as these remain in the newer film, and it suffers by moving some of the occult "backstory" that Blair Witch savvily dispatched at the outset into the third quarter of the film, and barely seeming sure of why it's doing this.
Ten years ago, Daniel Meyrick and Eduardo Sanchez become overnight sensations when their no-budget shocker The Blair Witch Project (1999) captured the demise of three doco-makers; both Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s Spanish-language [REC] (2007) and John Erik Dowdle’s shot-for-shot English-language remake Quarantine (2008) utilised found-footage ‘wobbly-cam’ superbly; Matt Reeves’ big-budget Cloverfield (2008) did not.
In the Earth (2021)
Directed by Ben Wheatley
influenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Plot Themes Visuals
It’s easy to see how “In the Earth” might be compared to the 1999 horror film “The Blair Witch Project,” because both movies are mainly about people possibly being trapped in the woods while an evil spirit might be on the loose.
You’ll be reminded of previous genre entries like The Blair Witch Project and Wolf Creek during the first half, and probably flabbergasted during the increasingly opaque second half—a strobing montage of menacing imagery and ideas about nature’s dominion over our lives.
But after its evocative introduction, In the Earth ends up in comfortable, disappointingly underdeveloped territory for the director, incorporating some of Kill List ’s folk-horror undercurrents and A Field in England ’s psychedelia while borrowing freely from The Blair Witch Project .
Digital camera technology has improved exponentially since "The Blair Witch Project," so Wheatley and cinematographer Nick Gillespie are able to create images that are both eerie and strangely beautiful.
In fits, that identity is compelling, hypnotic, and terrifying, The Blair Witch Project by way of Annihilation .
This is where writer-director Ben Wheatley injects “The Silence of the Lambs” and “The Blair Witch Project” into his existing “Annihilation” narrative, though his being extra here reads more like a desperate attempt to distract from the movie’s low budget than a stroke of genius.
Phoenix Forgotten (2017)
Directed by Justin Barber
influenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Plot
But for a genre whose creative peak began and ended with The Blair Witch Project (still one of the most overrated horror movies of all time), Phoenix Forgotten does something that few other found-footage movies can be bothered with: it makes us genuinely care about the protagonists.
There will be a lot of comparisons made between Phoenix Forgotten and The Blair Witch Project (even Barber referenced it during our interview earlier this week), and I’ll be the first to admit that the former does certainly owe a lot to the latter.
It’s a clever and fresh approach to a genre that, following the success of The Blair Witch Project in 1999, has been done to death by countless horror films since.
It appears to have taken a surprising commitment of talent to turn out the blandly generic Phoenix Forgotten, another disappointingly derivative imitation of The Blair Witch Project, this time mashed up with the X-Files franchise.
Based on a real-life 1997 UFO sighting that's since been widely debunked but is still widely discussed, Phoenix Forgotten does what The Blair Witch Project also successfully did: It jumps off from reality and slyly mixes in fiction.
Most found-footage horror films owe a sizable debt to The Blair Witch Project , but few have aped the genre’s touchstone quite as shamelessly as does Phoenix Forgotten, which chronicles the mysterious disappearance of two young men (one named Josh!) and a young woman who got lost in the middle of nowhere while shooting a documentary about a paranormal phenomenon.
The Visit (2015)
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
influenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Visuals
The decision to frame the whole thing as found-footage, however, is a fundamental flaw; not only is it a tired concept (the pinnacle of the sub-genre, The Blair Witch Project , was released in the same year as The Sixth Sense ) but it also fatally constricts both the narrative and the action.
Her handheld footage (thankfully, not all of the shaky-cam variety) is one of the director’s many nods to genre classics from “The Blair Witch Project” to “The Exorcist” to “Paranormal Activity.”
This might disappoint some cynical viewers who were first introduced to the gimmick when “The Blair Witch Project” popularized it in nauseating fashion back in 1999.
Yet here's writer-director M. Night Shyamalan — whose last in a string of flops, incidentally, was the theater-clearing After Earth, starring Jaden and dad Will Smith — pinning his comeback on a film utilizing a gimmick that already began wearing out its welcome soon after 1999's The Blair Witch Project made it all the rage.
Since The Blair Witch Project’s massive success in 1999, the found footage conceit has often worked well: it instills creepy realism while also cleverly turning the restrictions of low-budget filmmaking into a plot device.
Unfriended (2014)
Directed by Levan Gabriadze
influenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Visuals Themes
Like those of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity — both of which inspire scenes here — Unfriended's techniques are certain to be copy-pasted into imitators, some of which might improve upon it.
Perhaps the lead character's name is an homage to "The Blair Witch Project," the mother of all herky-jerky, low-budget horror films.
During the film’s most intense moments, “Cybernatural” amplifies the effect of that infamous shot from “The Blair Witch Project,” the one where Heather Donahue turns the camera on herself, oozing snot and tears into the camera as she hyperventilates.
Halloween , The Blair Witch Project and the recent It Follows delve into teenage alienation, loss of innocence and the uncertainty of adulthood, even though each one also features a supernatural phantom wreaking terror.
Like The Blair Witch Project, which turned the first person POV found footage approach into a now well-worn waste of time, and Paranormal Activity, which mounted a similarly styled camera on a tripod to capture the spooky goings-on in a couple’s suburban home, this macabre novelty finds a group of friends haunted by the spirit of their dead girl, a friend who killed herself over cyberbullying.
It does for Skype what The Blair Witch Project did for forests.
Open Water (2004)
Directed by Chris Kentis
influenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Visuals Plot Themes
Once you get past the video-to-film transfer, which gives the film the shaky, dizzy feel of “The Blair Witch Project,” it’s easy to settle into the movie.
Like The Blair Witch Project (1999), it's a homemade horror film with more tense thrills than any recent Hollywood picture.
Hyped, quite correctly, as "The Blair Witch Project" meets "Jaws", "Open Water" exists on that fringe of believability required to sustain any horror premise - a vacationing couple on a scuba trip are left behind in shark-infested waters.
This shark-attack thriller is more like "The Blair Witch Project," which was an initially shocking, chilling film that has been greatly diminished because it was overhyped (and because of a much-inferior sequel).
It also felt a slight bit like The Blair Witch Project, with its independent look and shaky handheld cameras.
The obvious reference point here is The Blair Witch Project, which left some folks nauseous, many people pissed, and some genuinely, honestly freaked.
What started as an interesting concept back in 1999 with the overrated “The Blair Witch Project,” quickly became old hat as a multitude of writers and directors tried to put their own spin on it, leading to numerous terrible knock-offs that flooded the market for about the next decade.
The stylistic trick – hey, here's a bunch of video we just happened to dig up! – got its first big exposure in 1999 with "The Blair Witch Project" and has ruled low-budget horror movies ever since.
Discovery: The Blair Witch Project pioneered the found footage genre in 1999.
Sixteen years after “The Blair Witch Project,” movie studios continue their love affair with found-footage horror movies, almost guaranteed profit centers that can be ground out for next to nothing since they don’t require name actors, elaborate location shooting, careful camera work or much in the way of a coherent story.
And so, unfortunately, for every truly chilling examples of the genre (The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, [REC]), there are several sequels, imitators, and remakes (Paranormal Activity 4, [REC] 3: Genesis, Quarantine) that continue to dilute the potential of the format.
Willow Creek (2013)
Directed by Bobcat Goldthwait
influenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Plot Visuals
But once their characters venture deep into the woods and set up camp, the film has nowhere to go but down the same narrative path as almost every found-footage tale since The Blair Witch Project began the craze back in 1999.
Despite the impressively committed performances by the two leads and the screenplay’s touches of sly humor, the proceedings are mostly all too redolent of the endless found-footage horror films that have followed in the wake of The Blair Witch Project.
As a horror movie, it's dull and derivative, its most obvious inspiration being The Blair Witch Project -- although you could say it takes its lead from any number of the ever-proliferating found footage horror fare of the past few years (which includes another Bigfoot-themed film, Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes ).
That’s nearly as groundbreaking as the film that unofficially started the found footage craze, 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project.”
He’s also clearly studied the most famous and effective of found-footage thrillers: The Blair Witch Project, to which Willow Creek bears more than a passing resemblance.
The film is clearly influenced by The Blair Witch Project, but Goldthwait ratchets up the suspense in an eccentric mixture of reality and fiction that consistently engages against all odds.
Host is not just brilliant, it's as good and as important, and in many of the same ways/for the same reasons, as The Blair Witch Project .
Like The Blair Witch Project more than 20 years before it, Host opts to use the actors’ real names, and works best because of the incredibly naturalistic performances from all the cast.
The length of a Zoom meeting in which six friends deign to embark on an online séance which goes, of course, horrifically off the rails, is as efficient a low-fi horror invention since 1999’s The Blair Witch Project allowed for a redefining moment in genre possibility.
Some eerie shots seem cribbed from the found footage landmark, The Blair Witch Project, while a pair of spooky stagings—involving flour and a blanket—recall this year’s Invisble Man.
As with The Blair Witch Project, which is still #1 when it comes to this style of homemade movies, nothing actually needs to be there in the darkness for us, as viewers, to let our imaginations run wild trying to see it.
Director Rob Savage (who also cowrote with Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepard) makes one nod to The Blair Witch Project, by having the actors use their own names for the characters.
The Devil Inside (2012)
Directed by William Brent Bell
influenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Visuals
The characters who manned the cameras in The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield weren't pros, providing an excuse for the shakiness and dizzy-making whip pans.
Nearly thirteen years after The Blair Witch Project introduced the concept of “found footage” films to mainstream audiences while simultaneously harnessing the power of the burgeoning Internet to launch a massively successful viral campaign that hinged on audiences buying into the “truth” behind the film, the found fauxtage horror genre continues to chug almost unstoppably along.
When director William Brent Bell and co-writer Matthew Peterman, the brains behind the equally turgid "Stay Alive," aren’t evoking every single exorcism movie this side of, well, "The Exorcist," they’re dutifully aping the decade-old wave of imitation spawned by the success of "The Blair Witch Project" and fueled more recently by the "Paranormal Activity" franchise.
The fact that “The Devil Inside” tries to fob itself off as some pseudo-scientific exploration of something that really happened in 2009 isn’t new; that’s what these types of movies have done since 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project” made people believe a pile of sticks was a thing to fear.
Arriving after just 73 minutes, it’s a finale dumber than all of the found-footage folderol since “The Blair Witch Project” and an argument for euthanizing this subset of the horror genre altogether.
Superficially, The Devil Inside is yet another "found footage" picture after the fashion of Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project or [REC] or Paranormal Activity .
The Dyatlov Pass Incident (2013)
Directed by Renny Harlin
influenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Plot Themes
Of all the found-footage horror movies released since The Blair Witch Project , none has so closely aped the original, right down to the plucky female director (Holly Goss), the interviews with locals prior to heading out, the disorientation that renders their map useless, the discovery of human body parts, etc.
Directed by Renny Harlin (2006's " The Covenant ") and penned by first-time screenwriter Vikram Weet, "Devil's Pass" is an overt copycat of 1999's " The Blair Witch Project ," the picture hitting every single narrative beat of that innovative box-office phenomenon.
On the tapes, we see psychology major Holly King (Holly Goss) and film student/conspiracy theorist Jenson Day (Matt Stokoe) experiencing an uncanny sense of déjà vu in their snowy surroundings – a sense perhaps shared by anyone who has seen The Blair Witch Project or its many imitators.
“The Blair Witch Project” conjured up common fears by shooting in familiar situations and settings.
A year earlier, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s low-budget indie film The Blair Witch Project frightened filmgoers with its “found footage” tale of teenagers investigating the legend of the Blair Witch in the Black Hills woods in Maryland.
In 1999, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez changed the face of horror with The Blair Witch Project, a film that has given birth to—I’m being approximate here—fifteen thousand found-footage movies over the last seventeen years.
“Blair Witch” is a sequel/reboot of the hand-held camera classic “The Blair Witch Project,” a film so close to the original that it’s no wonder the filmmakers don’t acknowledge the first film in the screenplay credits.
1999 was the year of The Blair Witch Project.
It wasn’t a smart script or great acting that made “The Blair Witch Project” a box-office sensation in 1999.
In 1999, “The Blair Witch Project” was a milestone of low-budget, found-footage horror.
The Witch (2016)
Directed by Robert Eggers
influenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Visuals Themes
There is something shadowy and indistinct about the woods in The Witch that recalls, appropriately, The Blair Witch Project .
The Witch, the latest Sundance sensation to spark a studio bidding war, reminded this viewer more than once of The Blair Witch Project .
The Witch is a game-changer along the lines of The Blair Witch Project, a stripped-down approach to horror that doesn't depend on bogeymen or blood gushers, just macabre surrealism.
It's like The Blair Witch Project all over again.
The simple conceit of It Follows—a monster who takes the form of an ordinary person—was too mundane for some; The Blair Witch Project’s shaky-cam marathon in the woods left many viewers nauseated rather than terrified.
As Above, So Below (2014)
Directed by John Erick Dowdle
influenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Plot Visuals
Perdita Weeks is a strong and capable female lead, the film manages to borrow concepts from " The Blair Witch Project " and " Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade " and put its own spin on them, and the addition of alchemy is both warranted and a breath of fresh air to the horror franchise, but "As Above, So Below" mostly resorts to cliché tactics when it has so much more right within its grasp.
Faux-documentary style filmmaking was hard to come by before 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project,” a film that kickstarted a genre with a creative and commercial bang.
To the degree that it works ? in pictures like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity - it's because the ?captured on video?
It's all too easy to imagine how he and his cowriter brother, Drew, pitched their creation: The Blair Witch Project meets Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code, with a touch of Insidious!
While the film has a reasonably engaging cast and some decent scares, the script feels like an uneasy blend of The Blair Witch Project and Tomb Raider.
The Descent (2005)
Directed by Neil Marshall
influenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Visuals Themes
This is also when the filmic allusions start piling up into their own sort of zombie brigade: scare quotes, if you like, from Don't Look Now, Carrie, Apocalypse Now, The Blair Witch Project, the Gollum sequences in The Lord of the Rings, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original Alien, and in one sudden flash-reveal of a whole brigade of crouching monsters, a direct lift from Aliens.
For more recent echoings, go to The Time Machine , Alien , First Blood, The Blair Witch Project , Pitch Black and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for starters.
They include explicit allusions (in addition to the movies already mentioned above) to " Picnic at Hanging Rock ," " Carrie ," “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ,” " The Third Man ," "The Fourth Man," " Don't Look Now ," " The Blair Witch Project " " Vertigo ," " Apocalypse Now "... and plenty more.
The shocks occasionally stray into the derivative -- elements of The Blair Witch Project hang uncomfortably in the air, and a few clichés mar the proceedings every now and then -- but they never run out of steam, and you rarely see them coming before they hit you full in the face.
Only two films in the past few years accomplished this feat: The Blair Witch Project and Gore Verbinski's remake of the Japanese horror film, The Ring.
Marshall is also an astute 'borrower' of other films, from the piton clipping suspense of "Cliffhanger," to the video camera revelations of "The Blair Witch Project" to a combined "Carrie"/"Apocalypse Now" moment that wows with its audacity.
Cloverfield (2008)
Directed by Matt Reeves
influenced by The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Themes Visuals
There have been some great ones—2007's " [REC] " and 2008's " Cloverfield " spring to mind—but "The Blair Witch Project" remains the best of the bunch.
I love that it uses The Blair Witch Project as a launchpad for its low-tech, found-footage brilliance; I love its genius-level viral marketing campaign and its Ludditism and overt technophobia.
Comme toute bonne catastrophe qui se respecte, c’est dans les rues de New York que se déroule se croisement pour le moins inusité entre Godzilla et The Blair Witch Project.
The Blair Witch Project and Diary of the Dead proved that this handheld format is completely viable and sustainable in feature length horror films, but it�s difficult to even consider Cloverfield a horror film, since in its action scenes, it�s far more concerned with spectacle than suspense.
I admire the less-is-more aesthetic of films like "Open Water" and was a fan of "The Blair Witch Project," which I described at the time as "a crude but stunningly pure and elemental act of the imagination."
So if an out-of-nowhere groundbreaker like The Blair Witch Project pushed such storytelling over into viable generic territory, then it only makes sense that a big-budget, predetermined hit like Cloverfield would one day consummate that marriage: the blockbuster finally merged with YouTube.
One recalls the time 'loopiness' of Nacho Vigalondo's "Timecrimes" and the circular lost in the woods disorientation of "The Blair Witch Project."
A mystery wrapped in a conundrum, “The Endless” is a sort of indie/sci-fi/horror movie hybrid, recalling “The Blair Witch Project,” “The Witch” and “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” — small budgeted, striking efforts shot on locations that are an integral part of the film’s story and power.