It's been over 25 years since The Blair Witch Project came into our lives and terrified a generation of cinema-goers.
When the cult horror film was released in 1999, many who paid their money to go and see it went in believing it was a true story, and for good reason.
The groundbreaking marketing tactics employed claimed that the film was made up of 'found footage' and that the actors in it were a group of young filmmakers named Josh, Heather, and Mike, who had really disappeared in the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland, in search of the fabled 'Blair Witch'. And in a world before smartphones or ChatGPT, we all bought it.
But one of the big questions traumatised viewers had after seeing it was why there seemingly wasn't even a whiff of a witch in the entire movie.
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Some have since claimed the elderly woman named Mary Brown we see is likely her. But is it?
Writing on Reddit, one fan-turned-sleuth said: "I think that the crazy shut in woman who claimed to have seen the witch as a child was in fact the witch all along.
"It is clearly shown that she is mentally unstable during the interview and while in the car Heather mentions that she also made several other ridiculous claims that seem to boast her self perceived fame"
"When hearing about how these kids are investigating the legend she decides to use them as a way to finally get her recognition, something she does by stalking, terrorising, and murdering them in the woods.
"She then is the one who collected the tapes and turned them into the police so that she could finally be seen in the spotlight and also prove to everyone that she is not crazy."
Well, speaking to LADbible, one of the brains behind the Blair Witch, Dan Myrick, who made the film with pal Eduardo Sanchez, revealed the truth behind why we never actually saw the real witch.
He told us that in order to make the movie, he and Sanchez devised a whole plan to lead their disoriented actors through the sinister woods and into a state of sheer terror.
So concerned by the project was Heather that she actually brought a knife to set, fearing she might get murdered.
Their method also involved waking the stars up in the middle of the night with the sounds of creepy children's voices and their tents being rattles... and one night they were a little too successful.
"We wanted to capture all that realism, and the best way we knew to do that was to subject them to the real process," Myrick, who says he's written more scripts for several unmade sequels, told us.
"The now infamous tent scene, where the tent's shaking, that was one of our more logistically challenging scenes; we had the actors inside the tent, we told them we had a trail marked out for them to run down because we didn't want them running into a tree, because it's dark, obviously.
"So we had this trail marked out where they were gonna run out of the tent, follow the trail and then hunker down.
"Then we had the sound effects guy playing kids' voices outside the tent, we had a lot going on that night, and one of the people we were working with, we had them in white Long Johns, and this idea we had - taking a page from the old documentaries - it would be so cool if the camera's running and they come out of the tent, it's shaking, and they're running down the trail and in the background you could see a little ghostly image, like a humanoid image between the trees in the darkness.
"So the camera wipes over it and in analysis later you can freeze frame it, see the image there, it would be so cool. We thought it would be awesome.
"So we set it all up for that to happen, so naturally, we dressed our actor in a white Long Johns and set them up in the woods and we just told Heather to make sure she got a shot of that as she's running.
"So she's running and the cameras shaking around, and she says, 'What the f**k is that?!" and for whatever reason it just didn't register, the image of the guy did not register, and we were kind of bummed out at the time, we made that poor soul go out there in the middle of the woods, he even fell in the water, it was so freezing, we had to take our clothes off and cover him up.
"A lot of work for no results. And all we had was Heather going 'What the f**k is that?!' cause she's reacting to the guy standing there, but the camera never covered it, so it remains a mystery to this day what she was reacting to."
But despite the failed attempt at a special effect, Myrick admits that it's probably better that the audience never got to see the real 'Blair Witch'.
"It's one of those happy accidents, right, let the audience's imagination envisage what she's reacting to. Who's to say it wouldn't have been obvious that it was a guy in Long Johns standing there and we had to cut that out." he said.
"But yeah, it ended up being a moment where people caught onto, 'Oh what is she reacting to?' There's a presence out there, there's something out there messing with them, but it's anybody's guess as to what it actually is."
Topics: TV and Film, Entertainment, US News, Viral
Dominic Smithers