The Blair Witch Project is finally being released in the format its filmmakers intended.
The 1999 horror movie is set to get a home video release in the format it was originally shot, according to Mike Monello of Haxan Films, the production company responsible for the film.
The original movie was shot in 16mm black and white, but, to make it suitable for a theatrical release, it had to be transferred to 35mm, Monello revealed in a new lengthy social media post.
“The Blair Witch Project was filmed on Hi8 video and 16mm b&w film and edited on a Media 100XR, a non-linear editing system in wide use then,” he wrote.
25 years later, our little movie, 'The Blair Witch Project,' is FINALLY being released as we always intended. Here are details for the curious. pic.twitter.com/w6S4dm2KKI
— Mike Monello (@mikemonello) November 11, 2024
“Since theatres then did not have video projectors, we had to transfer our DigiBeta master to 35mm via a process called ‘telecine,’ basically filming the video on a special screen in a controlled environment with a 35mm film camera.”
He went on to say that when The Blair Witch Project was transferred to home video, “[distributors] Artisan made a huge mistake” and instead worked not from the DigiBeta master, but the 35mm telecine transfer.
“This introduced serious motion errors,” Monello explained. “It gave the Hi8 footage film grain and muddied all the colours with a brown overcast, killing detail. The edits of that transfer became 3-frame dissolves, rather than hard cuts!”
The new version, he said, is the film the way it was intended to be seen “capturing the true look we wanted 25 years ago” and the new transfer’s “look, motion, and hard cuts create a far scarier psychological effect than all previous versions.”
The release comes with 90 minutes of deleted footage as well as a new documentary, he added.
Elsewhere, earlier this year the original Blair Witch Project team called news of the upcoming remake “bittersweet” after it was announced that the seminal film was getting a reboot at CinemaCon.
Since the 1999 original, there have been two sequels in 2000 and 2016, making this remake the fourth movie in the series.
English (US) · 