These ‘Blair Witch Project’ Bonus Features Question Aspects of the Movie [Guide to the Unknown]

Major Blairheads may already know about The Curse of the Blair Witch, the made-for-TV companion piece timed to come out on the SyFy network before The Blair Witch Project (henceforth to be abbreviated to TBWP) to stir up the “Wait, is this real?” fervor around the release. But fewer people are aware of the follow-up, The Massacre of the Burkittsville 7: The Blair Witch Legacy, created to drum up excitement for the Showtime TV release of TBWP.

It’s shot in faux-TV news magazine, 20/20 style, with expert interviews given straight to camera, and focuses primarily on a central thesis: that Rustin Parr, who’s said in TBWP to have abducted and killed a group of children in the 1940s under the direction of the witch (think: iconic little handprints all over the house in the woods, the “one kid stands facing the corner while the other is killed” rule), may not actually be responsible for the killings.

Instead, the documentary suggests it may have been the one surviving child from the group, a boy named Kyle Brody, who grew into a man who exhibited mental health issues and wrote in witch language. There’s even a Geraldo Rivera Willowbrook State School-style fictional expose-within-a-mockumentary called White Enamel, where we’re privy to Kyle’s agitated state. It is, quite frankly, a lot, and the implication that the “crazy” person must have actually been the killer is a bummer…but arguably, so is the weirdo loner trope that lives in Rustin Parr’s story. As horror lovers, we just have to take our lumps sometimes. (Although the “witch language” Kyle is seen writing in, Transitus Fluvii, is undeniably awesome — Duolingo, ready when you are.)

Rustin Parr’s whole deal is explored further in The Confessions of Rustin Parr, written by DA Stern, who also wrote the completely awesome companion book The Blair Witch Project Dossier. It’s part investigation, part journal pages from a priest introduced in the TV special who counseled Rustin Parr before his death. The book serves to further dismantle what TBWP set forth as a fairly cut-and-dry case (if you discount the wildcard that the murders were committed under a witch’s control).

Disputing your own story in non-essential bonus materials is kind of a weird and unheard-of thing to do, indie production or not. But TBWP was such a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon that it makes sense that everyone may have been trying to make the most of it in any way possible. And that’s a good thing! It fuels all of the stickman-toting nerds (complimentary) out there to this day. Whether it was Rustin or Kyle, we know it was really the witch behind all the ground-shifting, mind-bending evil-doing, and it seems like the forever fans are cool with a little ambiguity as long as it means we still get to have fun getting lost in the witch’s woods.

Join Kristen and Will this week on Guide to the Unknown as we go to town on Burkittsville. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to get a new episode every Friday.