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 his skin?
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00:00What scares Stephen King? The legendary horror author has made a career and a
00:05fortune frightening us all with his tales of terror. But what gets under his
00:09skin? Turns out there's one movie King says scared him so much that the first
00:14time he watched it he asked his son to turn it off before it was even over.
00:18Now it is my fault because it was my project. That film? The Blair Witch
00:25Project, the blockbuster indie horror movie that became a cultural phenomenon
00:29when it arrived in 1999. The Blair Witch Project is a found footage horror flick
00:34that rode a wave of buzz to blockbuster success. Shot for less than a million
00:38dollars the movie hauled in 248 million dollars. Why? Partly because some people
00:43thought it was real. It might seem silly now but before Blair Witch opened in
00:48theaters everywhere a legend began to spring up around the film. The faked
00:52documentary footage was so convincing that many people thought they were
00:55seeing something genuine. The movie opens with ominous text telling us
01:04that three filmmakers went into the woods in 1994 to shoot a documentary.
01:07They were never seen again. Only their footage was found. This simple but
01:12effective setup had some viewers thinking the actors weren't actors and
01:16were really missing. To play up this scenario missing posters featuring the
01:20three leads were distributed at the Sundance Film Festival where Blair Witch
01:24premiered. In the 2010 edition of Don's Macabre, a non-fiction book about the
01:29history of the horror genre, Stephen King wrote one thing about Blair Witch, the
01:33damn thing looks real. Another thing about Blair Witch, the damn thing feels
01:38real and because it does it's like the worst nightmare you ever had. King also
01:43revealed that his first watch of the film was more like a half watch. It was a
01:49real-life horror story for Stephen King. In Don's Macabre, King mentions that he
01:54first saw the Blair Witch project after he was nearly killed after being struck
01:58by a minivan. I was, in a manner of speaking, the perfect viewer. Roaring
02:03with pain from top to bottom, high on painkillers and looking at a poorly
02:07copied bootleg videotape on a portable TV. King goes on to claim that when the
02:12lead characters start discovering strange Lovecraftian symbols hanging
02:15from the trees, he asks his son to turn the damn thing off. King adds,
02:20It may be the only time in my life when I quit a horror movie in the middle
02:23because I was too scared to go on. The famed horror scribe wrote that his
02:32fears stem from both the painkillers he was on and the quality of the footage,
02:35but added, Basically, I was just freaked out of my mind. Those didn't look like
02:40Hollywood location woods. They looked like an actual forest in which actual
02:44people could actually get lost. The realism of the footage was the key. Blair
02:49Witch doesn't feel like a Hollywood movie because it wasn't a Hollywood
02:53movie. It was a truly independent production that blew up into a phenomenon.
02:58King sums it up perfectly. The idea is complete genius, and a big budget would
03:03have wrecked it. These days, some folks seem to dismiss Blair Witch as little
03:08more than a curiosity, but even if you know the film is, of course, fake, it still
03:13has the power to scare. There's an authenticity to the material that's
03:16nearly impossible to replicate.