Michael Williams will never forget the instant that The Blair Witch Project entered his life, thanks to three words printed in the actors’ go-to publication, Backstage Magazine.
It was the mid-1990s and Williams, a young theatrically trained actor fresh out of state college, saw a notice for an open casting call on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, somewhere in the area of Astor Place.
“When I opened ‘Backstage’ it said ‘improvisational feature film,’ those were the first three words, and I was like, ‘What?’” Williams recalled.
It’s been nearly 30 years, and it’s difficult to state how crucial those three words were in Williams’ life. He, along with co-stars Heather Donahue and Joshua Leonard, were at the center of a pop culture firestorm in 1999 thanks to the lo-fi D.I.Y. independent film that became a box office sensation.
The brutally simple premise of The Blair Witch Project is best summed up by the now-iconic verbiage on the film’s poster: “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.”
Well before the likes of found footage successors such as 2007’s Paranormal Activity or 2008’s Cloverfield, there was Blair Witch, the understatedly terrifying “improvisational feature film” that could.
“Those were the three words that got me,” said Williams. “And then, obviously, we had the freedom to shoot with a video camera, so one example would be like when we came across the stickman forest, and I have to come across it first – because this whole movie was filmed using notes in film canisters to each actor and we didn’t know what each other’s notes said, and just (using) what they called ‘waypoints’ – and coming across the stickman trees, you’ve got to react to that, and I remember reacting to it and being like, ‘Eh, I can do better, let me try this again,’ and then you just stop the video camera and go, ‘Alright, let’s try this again.’ Because you had the accessibility to just shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. They had 22 hours of footage when all was said and done, I think, from being in the woods for seven or eight days, it was pretty cool.”
Williams will take part in a question-and-answer session at a special screening of The Blair Witch Project at 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 2 at Kevin Smith’s SModcastle Cinemas in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. The screening coincides with the theater’s inaugural SModcastle Horror Fest, happening on Saturday, Nov. 1.
Williams recently wrapped a 26-day storytelling series on his social media channels (he’s at michaelceewilliams on Instagram and TikTok) sharing behind the scenes stories from the production of Blair Witch.
For a film as obsessed-over as this one has been – with many believing for a time that what they were seeing was authentic found footage of three young filmmakers in peril – what does Williams think remains the movie’s best-kept secret? “The fact that we had so much contact with the crew,” he said.
“It was funny, because for years you’d just hear the media and smaller outlets being like, ‘Oh, they tortured them in the woods, they had no idea what was going on, they really thought that the directors were messing with them,’ so I’ve told the story and utilized my own narrative to say, ‘We’re actually trained actors, we went to school for theater, got cast out of a thousand people, and knew what we were getting into,’” Williams said. “Now, we didn’t know every event that would happen, but we knew full well that there would be events because we had notes throughout the entire shooting, we had walkie-talkies (to communicate) with the directors, and we had had escape routes out of the woods – which, one night, we actually had to use to get out of the woods.”
Day Three of the film, Williams revealed, had to be shot twice.
“Nobody really knows that we staying in a hotel one night because it was 24 hours of straight rain and it was just completely unmanageable, so we had to hike out of the woods, go to a house, make a phone call, get the directors to pick us up, bring us to a hotel and then start Day Three all over again the next day,” he said.
“Those stories got completely lost at the onset and I understand why, because we were supposedly dead. So the whole marketing of the film really trumps the fact that we were actors, and by the time we’d come out and said we were actors, it was a little bit like the news is three weeks old and America’s on to another movie. So it got confusing for a long time as to what was going on with the (question of) were we acting, were we not acting.”
