The Horror Movie That Scared Stephen King So Much He Turned It Off
What scares Stephen King? The legendary horror author has made a career (and a fortune) frightening us all with his tales of terror. But what gets under King's skin? What gives him the creeps? "Pet Sematary" was famously sold as the "Stephen King novel that scared Stephen King," mostly because King thought the book was too damn bleak but published it to fulfill a contractual obligation.
But what about horror works by other people? Are there horror movies that give the master of horror the heebie jeebies? As it turns out, there's one movie in particular King has claimed scared him. In fact, it scared him so much that the first time he watched it he requested it be turned off before the film even ended. That film: "The Blair Witch Project," the blockbuster indie horror movie that became a cultural phenomenon when it arrived in 1999.
The Blair Witch Project explained
Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, and starring Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard as fictionalized versions of themselves, "The Blair Witch Project" is a found footage horror flick that rode a wave of buzz to blockbuster success. Shot for only $200,000–750,000 (the price varies), the movie hauled in $248.6 million. Why? Because people thought it was real. It might seem silly now, but before "Blair Witch" opened in theaters everywhere, a legend began to spring up around the film. The faux documentary footage was so convincing that many people thought they were seeing something genuine.
The movie opens with ominous text telling us that three filmmakers went into the woods in 1994 to shoot a documentary. They were never seen again — only their footage was found. This simple but effective set-up had some viewers thinking that Donahue, Williams, and Leonard were really missing. To play up this scenario, missing posters featuring the three leads were distributed at the Sundance Film Festival, where "Blair Witch" premiered.
In Stephen King's "Danse Macabre," a non-fiction book wherein King waxes about the horror genre, the legendary author writes: "One thing about 'Blair Witch': the damn thing looks real. Another thing about 'Blair Witch': the damn thing feels real. And because it does, it's like the worst nightmare you ever had, the one you woke from gasping and crying with relief because you thought you were buried alive and it turned out the cat jumped up on your bed and went to sleep on your chest."
But that's not all King had to say about the movie. He also revealed that his first watch of the film scared him so much he had to turn it off.
The Blair Witch Project scared Stephen King
In "Danse Macabre," King mentions that he first saw "The Blair Witch Project" after he was nearly killed by being hit by a van:
"The first time I saw 'Blair Witch' was in a hospital room about twelve days after a careless driver in a minivan smashed the sh*t out of me on a country road. I was, in a manner of speaking, the perfect viewer: roaring with pain from top to bottom, high on painkillers, and looking at a poorly copied bootleg videotape on a portable TV. (How did I get the bootleg? Never mind how I got it.)"
King goes on to claim that when the lead characters "start discovering strange Lovecraftian symbols hanging from the trees," he asked his son "to turn the damn thing off." King adds: "It may be the only time in my life when I quit a horror movie in the middle because I was too scared to go on." The famed horror writer states that part of his fear was a combination of both the painkillers he was on and the quality of the footage, "but basically I was just freaked out of my mind. Those didn't look like Hollywood-location woods,they looked like an actual forest in which actual people could actually get lost."
The realism of the footage was the key. "Blair Witch" doesn't feel like a Hollywood movie, because it wasn't a Hollywood movie — it was a truly independent production that blew up into a phenomenon. King sums it up perfectly: "The idea is complete genius, and a big budget would have wrecked it."
These days, some folks seem to dismiss "Blair Witch" as little more than a curiosity. But even if you know the film is, of course, fake, it still has the power to scare. There's an authenticity to the material that's nearly impossible to replicate.