Butt News Movie Club #7: The Blair Witch Project
I Would Rather Be Eaten by a Witch Than Watch a Movie About a Witch
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I couldn’t write this newsletter without my husband, Ahamefule. I mean, I could—that’s actually the point of this paragraph I’m about to write—but it wouldn’t be as funny or as good. The Butt News process (also the Shit, Actually process) is sacred and unchanging and it goes like this:
Ahamefule and I pick a movie.
Ahamefule and I sit down to watch the movie.
Ahamefule and I make fun of the movie while I take notes on my laptop and write down all the jokes that we say.
I procrastinate for days and days.
At the last possible second I sit down and grind through those notes, stringing all our jokes together into some kind of legible prose.
I GET ALL THE BUTT CREDIT AND ALL THE BUTT FAME.
Aham gets as much of the Butt Money as he wants because I love him and he earned it.
We kiss.
I haven’t kept this method a SECRET or anything, but I haven’t put it in print anywhere officially, so I just want to acknowledge how much uncredited time and work Ahamefule puts into Butt News. SO MANY of your favorite jokes are things he said, including but not limited to:
“Want to Feel Old? The Kid from Sleepless in Seattle is a DILF Now!”
“The music in this movie is so bad it’s like cars are playing the instruments.”
“Six million dollars in DVD players were stolen!?!? That’s over six million DVD players!!!!!!!!”
“It’s like the whole purpose of this movie is to drown out a barking dog.”
“Lady, if you just want to blow an Australian guy, you don’t have to pay for it!”
“Did you know that 9/10 spider bite fatalities are men!!?!? And they’re usually bitten by FEMALE spiders! What happened to all the male spiders???? Maybe you should look at their suicide rate! And how many of them died in the spider war!”
“BOY HOWDEE name’s Jeffy Pampers and I sure would love me some pasketti!!!!!!!”
“DERMOT IS LIKE I’M DEFINITELY GOING TO CATCH HER IN THIS FORD CONTOUR.”
AND SO ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! He’s the one who said “cock-blocktopus” when we were watching Love Actually (buy my book!), for freak’s sake!!!! He really is a precious genius who is indescribably generous with his genius spice, shaking it all over my work and making me rich. I am blessed and grateful forever.
BUT THIS WEEK! HE IS BUSY “PLAYING ROCK AND ROLL”!!!!! And as I have committed to you, my Butt Babies, I have no choice but to write a whole fucking Butt News without him, all by myself, for the first time.
I asked Ahamefule if there are any movies that he has absolutely no interest in, that he doesn’t think would inspire particularly good material for him, because I don’t want to squander any future Butt News golden nuggets. I told him he could pick anything he wanted for me to watch. It seemed like a good idea.
And this a-hole! Picked! THE FUCKING BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.
Due to an anxiety condition, Ahamefule cannot watch a horror movie. Basically anything with suspense or a jump scare is out. Like, he had to walk out of Monsters, Inc. <3 <3 <3 Therefore it’s ONLY LOGICAL, he said, that the week he is unavailable I should do a horror movie for Butt News. It might be my only chance! Give the people what they want!
The thing is that I also hate horror movies, though!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I hate them with my whole body! I just don’t MEDICALLY HATE THEM, like he does, so I guess I technically have no excuse not to watch one in the name of cinema. So I watched it. Okay?? I watched it all the way through and I paid attention!
“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.”
No thanks! Already no thanks! This is hell to me! I literally hate this. I would never watch this.
I spend a lot of time in the woods because my family has this old log cabin (and, by the way, the old-timer who built it with his own hands in the ‘30s, Old Man Donald, DIED ON THE PROPERTY) where I do a lot of writing by myself, and the thing with the woods is that you know exactly what’s in them (ferns, deer, our old well) to an extent that is actually boring (oh, another log? zzzzzzz), but at the same time you have NO IDEA what’s in them (witches, Old Man Donald, something crawling out of the old well)! During the day I do not believe in ghosts. But at night? If I accidentally left the light on in the gazebo and I have to walk 20 feet through the yard (inside the fence!) to turn it off? I am rat-chattering like old Ebenezer Scrooge!
Anyway, that’s what this movie is about. Not knowing what’s in the woods. No thanks. I already have that!
We open with this film student named Heather getting ready to go investigate something called “the Blair Witch” and “what happened at Coffin Rock.”
Hey, idea: maybe nobody ever investigate anything? Like, government corruption or whatever, yeah. But not GHOSTS. Not WEIRD SHIT IN THE WOODS.
Except also, actually, I have to say, the disappointing thing about life is that nothing is ever anything. Everything is always mundane. It’s never a satanic cult or a cryptid or Old Man Donald. A murder in the woods is always a meth thing or a controlling boyfriend or a regular serial killer, and even regular serial killers are all mundane in their own way! Oh, my mom made fun of my ears so now I need to collect ears! That’s (one of the reasons) why Qanon is so dumb. NOTHING IS ACTUALLY THIS INTERESTING. The conspiracy is voter suppression, dickheads! The conspiracy is TRICKING YOU INTO BELIEVING IN THIS CONSPIRACY.
Heather’s friend and camera boy Josh comes to pick her up and she’s like “Hey, it’s Mr. Punctuality” in a sarcastic voice because he’s late, a chilling glimpse of the horror to come that is Heather’s personality. Josh explains that he managed to steal the fancy camera from the film school, which, I’m not sure why the film school wouldn’t let you check out the fancy camera to make films? Isn’t that what you do at film school?
They go pick up a guy named Mike, who they don’t know, I guess (how big is this film school?), but who signed on to do sound for this “movie” because it’s an “opportunity.” He is grateful for the “opportunity.” Okay. Best case scenario, Michael, an opportunity to do WHAT? Carry a bunch of heavy equipment on a hike? Speaking as someone blessed to be lifelong-sandwiched between the Olympic and Cascade mountains, this isn’t even a part of the country where the hikes are even good!!!! Oh, a tick-infested sea-level walk through thousands of small identical trees? Feed me to a witch instead!
Heather, Mike, and Josh interview people around the town about the Blair Witch, while Heather does her best Keith Morrison (she could NEVER):
“There are an unusually high number of children put to rest here, most of them from the 1940s, yet, no one in the town seems to recall anything unusual about this time. To us anyway. Yet legend tells a different story—one whose evidence is all around us, etched in stone.”
That’s not even true, though, because 1) every townsperson literally IMMEDIATELY gabble-gobbles the entire story at them, and 2) the number of children killed in the story is literally just seven. Your eagle eye glanced around and detected a mere seven extra 1940s child graves at the graveyard? How many 1940s child graves is a rural Maryland graveyard supposed to have?? Get outta here, Heather! Fake news! Lock her up!
The kids talk to the three kind of townsfolks: old man, chunky mom, and backwards hat construction dirtbag.
They find out that there was an old hermit who lived in a cabin on the mountain and one day in the ‘40s he came down into the town and said, “I’m finally finished,” and the people were like huh what and went up to his cabin to see if maybe he finished a big LEGO or something but instead found out he murdered seven kids in his dang basement. Backwards hat says that his parents used to use the story to scare him into going to bed, and frankly that is hilariabaldwinhilariabaldwinhilariabaldwin. We act like it’s normal to just make kids scared for their lives so they’ll go to bed?? LOL. Lock us up!
Man, fuck this movie, though. I literally JUST THIS YEAR learned how to walk from the car into the cabin in the dark! This has set me back a decade!!!!!! Now I’m gonna be back to doing the thing where I have to take the house key off the keychain so I can leave the car running with the brights on while I sprint to the door, hyperventilating. Do you know how many manicures I’ve fucked up trying to get my thumbnail into the keyring?
Chunky mom says she heard a story that two hunters went camping near the hermit’s murder cabin and they disappeared, and her baby starts going, “NO NO NO NO NO NO” and hitting her in the face, which is incredible baby acting tbh and also effectively spooky and I didn’t like it.
Backwards hat says that the way the hermit would do the murders was he’d take the kids down to the basement in pairs, then make one of them face the corner while he murdered the other one.
Wait, but does the Blair Witch eat kids or adult male hunters? Is Blair Witch the murder hermit or did she, like, possess the hermit???? Why is it SEVEN kids if he only killed kids in pairs? What happened to the extra kid? Annoying!
The old guy says that he knows a crazy lady named Mary Brown who met the Blair Witch once, so they go find her. Bone-chillingly, she has a gate made of STICKS!!!!!! Remember how this movie made all of us scared of sticks for 20 years? Hahaha, we’re stupid.
Here’s the thing with Mary Brown: LOL. Mary Brown tells this amazing story about how she and her daddy would go fishing down by Tappy’s Creek, and one day she was laying down upon the leaves looking up at the sky while her dad did all the fishing (FEMALE PRIVILEGE) and suddenly she sensed some bitch standing over her:
Just to translate: that was Mary Brown explaining that one time when she was a kid, down by Tappy’s Creek, the Blair Witch came out of the woods, and opened up its woolen shawl, and flashed her, and the Blair Witch had a great big hairy horse pussy. Just so things are totally clear!!!!!
On their way out to the woods, Heather BERATES Josh for fucking up the depth of field on Mary’s interview (“You measured for meters? We’re not in EUROPE”) and her contempt level is inexplicably nuclear, like a chain-smoking wife who’s been married to a lil weenie she hates for 80 years, and is this what passed for female character development in the ‘90s? We didn’t know how to make women interesting so we just made them horrible? I have done no research to substantiate this so please don’t quote me.
The next day they head out into the woods and run into some creepy men fishing and one of the men says “you damn fool kids’ll never learn” and that, already, is where I turn back! Bye!
The other guy tells them that in the late 1800s a girl named Robin Weaver wandered off into the woods and then three days later she appeared back on her grandmother’s porch babbling about an old woman whose feet never touched the ground and “anybody worth their salt around here knows that this area’s been haunted by that old woman for years.” OKAY! COOL!!!!!!!! BYEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gotta mention that Josh’s haircut is shaved on the sides but looo-o-o-o-o-ong and flowing on top and we’re going to call that “the MackleMOST.” (I apologize. Ahamefule usually handles that kind of joke!)
They get to Coffin Rock and Heather reads out loud from some article about it: some guys went out searching for Robin Weaver (I think?) and never came back so then some OTHER guys went out searching for the first guys and they found them all dead at Coffin Rock bound together “forming a solid structure out of the men” and their intestines were torn out and demonic writing was carved into their flesh and the guys who found the bodies ran back to town to get help but when they got back to Coffin Rock the bodies had disappeared. Finders keepers, I guess!
“Sucks to be you!” - Robin Weaver
Then they CAMP AT COFFIN ROCK and, again, I’d rather just die. In the morning, Josh says that he heard two noises in the night: an owl and a cackling. Heather is like, “Huh! I’m a really sound sleeper—I didn’t even hear the cackling!”
I’M SORRY. YOU HEARD A CACKLING?????
Nobody even asks a follow-up question about the cackling. NOBODY suggests they fucking go home, what on account of the cackling!!!!!!!!
Heather decides to “go off map” because “we like shortcuts, don’t we?” NO!
Heather, the real witch, makes fun of Mike’s sparse chest hair.
Heather finds a dead mouse and mocks the Blair Witch: “What killed this dead mouse? Witchcraft?” Hey, PROBABLY!!!!!! Respect this #girlboss’s work, please!
Josh films Heather taking a piss, which is very cool.
Everyone starts fighting and getting mad at Heather because they are off the trail and they’re lost, which is REALLY BAD, hiking-wise, even if there isn’t an area witch! Josh says it’s fine, nbd. Mike can’t read a map, so he’s mad. Heather just insists they aren’t actually lost, which is not true or helpful. I guess it’s a good thing that I absolutely despise all of these people, since they’re all going to be passing through a witch’s curly horse colon very soon!!!!!!!!
They find a bunch of weird shit in the woods—sticks tied in the trees and seven piles of rocks. Heather insists they CAAAAAMP BYYYYY THE ROOOOOCKS YOOOOOU BIIIIITCH and then get up AT NIGHT to film them in the dark, at which point Josh KNOCKS OVER ONE OF THE ROCK PILES and instead of running straight to the car they just go back to the tent and go to sleep and they’re still chill enough to just be joking around about Gilligan’s Island. They’re awakened by snapping noises all around them in the woods, so Heather forces everyone out of the tent AGAIN to “get it” for the documentary. They all run around yelling for a little bit and then just survive I guess.
The next morning Josh insists that it was some locals messing with them (JUST AS BAD TBH!) but Heather points out that “nobody knows we’re out here.” You know what happens next and it’s not getting the fuck away!
They’re lost. They all argue about being lost. They yell at each other about being lost. Heather is soooooooooo annoying. I think I finally understand why people like this movie so much! Yeah, it’s scary, but at least you ALSO get to watch people you hate bicker!
They walk and walk but they cannot find the car. Heather says she thinks they need to camp for an extra night, still insisting that she totally knows where they are and it’s definitely NOT “in a witch’s vending machine.”
That night there are a ton more noises in the woods, and this time they’re louder! And they sound like footsteps! I love having a nervous system!
They wake up the next morning and find three piles of rocks around their tent, just like the piles of rocks from before, which definitely represented the seven dead children, so, very chill.
NOW THE MAP IS LOST.
MIKE CRACKS UP LAUGHING AND SAYS THAT HE THREW THE MAP INTO THE RIVER BECAUSE HE WAS MAD AT IT, LOL.
If men had a logline it would be “Throwing a map away because you decided it’s useless because you don’t know how to use a map.”
They decide to just keep walking south in a straight line and come to a clearing where there’s “voodoo shit” hanging all over the place, so Heather wastes a bunch of time shooting footage of all the little stick men like they don’t have anywhere to be and this hike is still going to somehow end at Cannes and not the hermit’s abandoned toilet.
They have to camp AGAIN. They decide not to light a fire because “we light fires, they know.” They hear weird little kid voices all around them, so Heather, again, commands that they get out of the tent to go film. Instead, they just scatter into the woods screaming.
“Did you hear that baby screaming?”
“There’s no fucking baby out there!”
They go back to their camp at dawn and all their stuff has slime all over it, which, I think we know where that came from and it rhymes with “dig Jerry’s Norse tushy”!
Heather still refuses to turn the camcorder off despite imminent death, and someone is probably writing a dissertation RIGHT NOW about how it’s an amazing metaphor for these modern youths and their TikToks! Josh agrees: “It’s totally like a filtered reality, man. It’s like you can pretend everything’s not quite the way it is.” Wowwwwwwwww.
They keep walking and walking and then realize that they’re passing the same log they already passed. They’re trapped in some kind of time loop. Shoot. No one should ever go in the woods, is the thing! Nature is healing itself by eating these losers!
They spend their last evening together reminiscing about cheeseburgers and mashed potatoes and all the other things they would like to eat if they were not lost in the woods being bullied by a witch, and then in the morning Josh is gone.
At this moment my dog startled and looked over at nothing, so fuck him!
Night falls again and Mike and Heather can hear Josh screaming in the woods.
Heather is like “JOSH?” [unzips tent flap]
WHY
JUST BE IN IT FOR YOURSELF AT THIS POINT
STAY IN THE TENT
BE HIDING
At no point would I ever, under any circumstances, go out in the woods and follow the screaming. IT’S SCREAMING!
The next morning they find a bundle of sticks tied up with Josh’s shirt and there’s a little pouch full of teeth and hair and blood and according to Wikipedia also a finger and a piece of tongue, although I personally could not see those. It sucks pretty bad. Heather does not like it.
At this point Heather is just fully losing it and my stepdaughter begins stress-cleaning our whole kitchen. One silver lining!
Then it’s the famous scene where we see up Heather’s nose and she finally accepts accountability for getting all of them killed. This is what it takes to get a woman to apologize, amiright?????
Then according to the closed captions there is a “soft grinding noise,” no thanks, so you know what Heather is into! It’s getting out of the tent, of course!
Oh, thank god. We’re only seven minutes from the end. Seven minutes in heaven!!!!
They follow the sounds of Josh’s screaming again and come to an abandoned house. It is very scary. Do not go into the house! Wait till tomorrow at least! They go into the house. They run around looking for Josh.
Here’s the thing about going into the house. Due to the part where you were caught in the time loop, you KNOW that this is in fact a witch situation! Which means that what you’re NOT going to find at the end is ordinary regular Josh who just tripped and fell down and hurt his leg. You’re definitely gonna find a witch at the end!
Mike is sure he can hear Josh screaming in the basement. He runs down there. Heather follows him, also screaming. You know where this is going. She finds Mike facing the corner. She dies. I hated it.
THE END
GET READY FOR THE BLAIR WIFE PROJECT BECAUSE I WILL BE HAUNTING YOUR ASS FOR THIS, AHAMEFULE!!!!!!
Since this week was a spooky movie AND it's October now...can we PLEASE watch The Craft!?!?!
I am very proud of everyone who has ever watched this movie. It's real scary! I waited like 15 years before I ever saw it and was like "oh I already know all about it and how fake it is and I love horror movies blah blah blah..." and was TERRIFIED. Good work Lindy and everyone else!