By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.
The essence of The Blair Witch Project that has made it so compulsively alluring for me has largely remained as elusive to me as ever. And then I realized: I had been looking in the wrong places for answers still dormant within the broader story of The Blair Witch Project‘s extraordinary success….”
She has been waiting for me. For two and a half decades, the Blair Witch and I have been circling each other in a cosmic dance of simultaneous attraction and repulsion. Each moment of fleeting critical contact has somehow been too much for me, and yet never ever quite enough. When The Blair Witch Project was first released in 1999, I was heavily ensconced in the goth scene in Melbourne, Australia. I DJ’d at the city’s biggest goth nightclub, managed a goth fashion boutique, and – in my first steps toward becoming a professional film critic – I was the founding co-editor of Fiend, a goth zine which sold around the country. Through Fiend I began my career firstly as a music journalist, soon writing for local street press, and later contributing to the first edition of the now-iconic first volume of the book 1000 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die in 2005.
I first wrote about The Blair Witch Project in my book Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (2014). It was a lengthy, detailed chapter, and yet somehow the itch that began when I first saw the film on a sweltering hot Australian summer day fifteen years earlier still wasn’t scratched. More recently, The Blair Witch Project provided the starting place for my forthcoming 2025 monograph The Cinema Coven: Witches, Witchcraft, and Women’s Filmmaking. Here, the plight of the movie’s doomed protagonist Heather in many ways embodied the way that filmmaking itself has been gendered as inherently masculine, and that women who dare to make movies are– like witches– broadly felt to be novelties at best, and interlopers at worst.
Despite these repeated encounters, the essence of The Blair Witch Project that has made it so compulsively alluring for me has largely remained as elusive to me as ever. And then I realized: I had been looking in the wrong places for answers still dormant within the broader story of The Blair Witch Project‘s extraordinary success. But with a slew of recent retrospective think pieces about the film celebrating its 25th anniversary, you’d be forgiven for thinking that its success was the most interesting part of the story. Made for what has been estimated to be anywhere between $20,000 and $35,000, after its successful world premiere at Sundance it was picked up by Arisan for $1 million and would go on to make what most accounts clock in to be about $250 million globally. Artisan would spend approximately $300,000 upgrading the sound and image quality and – famously – roughly another $1.5 million on an advertising campaign, the latter so successful and pioneering that it is widely considered one the first major successful marketing campaigns of the internet era. And evidence that it paid off was hard to miss. From the front cover of Time and Newsweek, appearances by the cast on Jay Leno and David Letterman’s late-night talk shows, feature profiles on Access Hollywood and Entertainment Weekly and parodies running rife everywhere from Scooby Doo to hardcore pornography. Everyone, it seems, was making money from The Blair Witch Project – except, as we now know, its cast, whose story of exploitation should be one of the film industry’s greatest shames (one hopefully not to be repeated with rumors of a forthcoming Blumhouse reboot).
Yet while the traditional way of approaching The Blair Witch Project phenomenon privileges the film as the textual core around which its various paratexts – books, TV specials, websites, etcetera – circulated, frankly this mode of engagement has failed me. I’ve tried these more orthodox critical approaches, and yet for myself in a very profound way it still feels unfinished, untapped, unsatisfying. Something essential has, until now, largely remained for me indefinable and slippery, hidden and unexplored.
And then – solely by chance – I sat down and revisited the soundtrack with what felt like fresh new ears. Now almost completely forgotten and at the time widely dismissed as little more than yet another flavor-of-the-month themed cash-grab, The Blair Witch Project – Josh’s Blair Witch Mix was not your usual film soundtrack. Its challenge was unique: how do you make a soundtrack for a film with no music? Taking the then-popular ‘90s phenomenon of “music inspired by the film” conceit to audacious new levels, as its title suggests Josh’s Blair Witch Mix was a high-concept album presented as a mixtape found in the abandoned car of one of the film’s central characters. This tape does not appear at all in the film; both conceptually and materially, it is largely disconnected from the actual movie.
Yet far from an ephemeral novelty, Josh’s Blair Witch Mix offers a path back through our senses as much as our intellect to a very specific historical moment. It is a revealing cultural artefact that tells us as much – if not more – about its extraordinary moment of production than even the film itself. By the late 1990s, the economic boom that defined the decade was in decline. Anxieties about the increasing hold technology had over our lives culminated in the Y2K scare. For Generation X, death had become a part of life, from the suicide of Kurt Cobain in 1994 to the headline-making Columbine school shooting that took place at the very time that The Blair Witch Project promotional machine was beginning to fully mobilize. The moral panic in Columbine’s wake saw the shooters’ favorite bands– Nine Inch Nails, KMFDM, and Marilyn Manson, in particular– sweep goth and industrial music in general into a storm of controversy, finger-pointing masses hungry for something to explain the inexplicable.
Its challenge was unique: how do you make a soundtrack for a film with no music?”
It is in this context that the goth and industrial music that made up Josh’s Blair Witch Mix was implicitly tethered to something much bigger than the movie itself. While it tonally reflected the increasing disillusionment of Gen X in particular as the decade sped chaotically to a close, it simultaneously tapped into broader cultural anxieties about this particular type of music in a very specific way. When revisiting the album today, there is a dark magic that rumbles deep in the guts of Josh’s Blair Witch Mix that feels almost palpable. The nihilism that defined its moment of production is woven into the very fabric of these twelve tracks. While at times despairing and frequently desperate, it is at its heart goth’s defining sense of defiance in the face of the inevitability of death that allows the album’s overarching sense of poetry and pathos to reign supreme.
In a recent email, the soundtrack’s producer Randy Gerston told me that “there wasn’t criteria for song selection other than our imaginations of what this tape would have on it. They just needed to have a dark, scary vibe…we were just improvising with the mix tape idea”. The word “improvising” here is key; reflecting the creative methodology of the largely ad-libbed film itself, the soundtrack too was fundamentally ignited by a kind of magical intuitive spark. What is often downplayed today, twenty-five years after the film’s original release, is just how often its directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez talked about the film at the time of its original release explicitly in terms of experimental filmmaking traditions. Central to this was a methodology they described as “method filmmaking”, which at its core was what granted the film its extraordinary energy and defining spark of authenticity. In an interview with Scott Dixon McDowell in The Journal of Film and Video in 2001, Myrick described it as follows:
It’s just an approach from both the actors’ side and the filmmaking side of reducing the process of the filmmaking technique. Basically it’s … when you look around you, there are no crewmembers. When you look around you, there are no cameras shooting the actors; they are shooting it themselves, so the process of filmmaking is as much a character as the actors themselves, and that was what our goal was. It was not to make the actors aware of the filmmaking process around them, and they we just kind of dubbed it the method filmmaking approach.” (143)
Like the film itself, the curation of the soundtrack too shared this same improvisational spirit on a really foundational level.
Josh’s Blair Witch Mix is a memorial. It stands as a monument to a time now lost, where independent art – including music and film – sat in uniquely fruitful tension with major corporate stakeholders, where it was less a case of indie artists selling out as it was more a spirit of big business buying in. At the end of the 20th century, this particular selection of goth and industrial music stood both simultaneously adjacent to a film that spoke at its heart about the failure of technology to save us, and– on its own merits– gave shape through that very same music to a pervasive outsider’s spirit of rebellion that transcended the specifics of the film itself. While nothing can rescue Josh’s Blair Witch Mix from the aura of commercial cynicism that marked its original release, something meaningful and vital and revealing and important can be found in the smouldering ashes of nostalgia, and actively reclaimed.
Across its twelve primarily goth and industrial tracks, these songs both individually and collectively tell a complex, multifaceted story. It is a story about keeping going in the face of new fears, new horrors, and new anxieties. It is a story about the complex ways both indie film and indie music found to thrive in the world of corporate big business. Listening and looking closely at each song reveals the complex, compelling stories of not just the artists themselves but a number of labels who between them provide an impressive cross-section of ‘80s and ‘90s indie music: Lydia Lunch and ZE Records, Laibach and Mute Records, Tones on Tails and Bauhaus’s relationship with Beggars Banquet, Front Line Assembly and Type O Negative’s with Roadrunner, Meat Beat Manifesto’s with Trent Reznor’s vanity label Nothing, and– as the token representative of grunge in what is otherwise a sea of black– The Afghan Whigs’ with the legendary Sub Pop.
The Blair Witch Project – Josh’s Blair Witch Mix is a musical topography of its very zeitgeist, both in relation to the prevailing mood that marked the end of the century, and to a moment where the high profile of indie music that was such a fundamental aspect of Generation X’s cultural identity would begin to shift and wane as we moved into the 2000s. While the production history of the film itself famously saw a low-budget, independently made horror film snapped up by mainstream Hollywood and released en masse in multiplexes around the world, these very same tensions between independent creative production and the faceless corporate machine are likewise replicated in the soundtrack itself. The significance of Josh’s Blair Witch Mix and the powerful yet broadly unexplored way it taps into its watershed historical moment is revealed most profoundly in the songs themselves. By means of illustration, a closer examination of the first song – Lydia Lunch’s cover of the dark classic “Gloomy Sunday” – we can perhaps start to reveal more of the secrets the Blair Witch has so long kept hidden.
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This is Burkittsville, formerly Blair. It is a small, quiet Maryland town. Much like a small, quiet town anywhere. No more than twenty families laid their roots here more than 200 years ago. Many of whom remain, either on this hill or in the town below. There are an unusually high number of children laid to rest here – most of whom passed in the 1940s. Yet, no one in the town seems to recall anything unusual about this time – to us anyway. Yet legend tells a different story. One whose evidence is all around us, etched in stone…”
Heather’s speech marks two beginnings. In The Blair Witch Project, it launches the eponymous movie-within-a-movie that the film student sets out to make with Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams who accompany her to rural Maryland in their respective capacities of cameraman and sound technician. Heather’s words seek to establish her authority as an omniscient storyteller, but already by this time we know her project is doomed to failure. Opening with its iconic title card, even before we even meet the filmmakers their fate has been sealed: the students disappear, and their video footage is all that remains.
On Josh’s Blair Witch Mix, a sample of this speech introduces a song where the presence of death is similarly inescapable. Taken from her 1980 debut album Queen of Siam, Lydia Lunch’s extraordinary cover of “Gloomy Sunday” clocks in at just over 3 minutes in length, yet arrives with the heavy sense of something almost pre-haunted. It is drenched in a weary, hard-learned recognition of the ubiquity of suffering, the futility of love, and the inevitability of death. Lunch drawls and whispers as her voice hovers somewhere undefined, stranded between speech and song. All this across the surface of a stripped-back piano-and-sax accompaniment that brings with it a woozy lyricism recalling Billie Holiday’s famous version of the same song released over forty years earlier.
While the production history of the film itself famously saw a low-budget, independently made horror film snapped up by mainstream Hollywood and released en masse in multiplexes around the world, these very same tensions between independent creative production and the faceless corporate machine are likewise replicated in the soundtrack itself.”
Originally written in 1933 by Hungarian composer Rezső Seress, “Gloomy Sunday” (often referred to as the “Hungarian Suicide Song”) has been covered more than 100 times in genres as disparate as country rap and breakcore, from Indonesia to Korea to Italy, by everyone from the Kronos Quartet, Elvis Costello, and Sinead O’Connor to Serge Gainsbourg, Church of Satan founder Anton LeVay and Björk. So why is Lydia Lunch’s comparatively more obscure rendition the one selected here? In fact, why this particular song at all?
Just as the film’s famous opening title card condemns its protagonists to their inevitable fate, so too “Gloomy Sunday” from the album’s outset reminds us of the all-pervasive presence of death. A pop-cultural phenomenon in its own right, urban legend holds that this minor-key musical chain letter left a trail of carnage in its wake, rendering the song a text-book case of the supposedly suicidogenic potential of art commonly associated with the Werther effect.
“Gloomy Sunday” was notorious from the very beginning. Seress wrote it with the original title “Vége a Világnak” (“It’s the End of the World”) when he was living in Paris, and had his heart recently broken at the departure of his long-suffering girlfriend who had grown tired of his until-then failed ambitions as a songwriter. Seress sat at his piano, and out poured his song about a man prepared to kill himself to prove his love. László Jávor, a similarly lovesick Hungarian poet, soon wrote his own lyrics to Seress’s music, renaming it “Szomorú vasárnap” (“Gloomy Sunday”). With its new name, two Hungarian versions were released in 1935 alone by popular singers Pál Kalmár and Katalin Karádyin. Both were sparse, icy vocal-and-piano renditions that between them largely established the mournful spirit of future versions for decades to come.
By 1936, the near-viral spread of “Gloomy Sunday” reached the United States. Paul Robeson’s version featured lyrics written by frequent George and Ira Gershwin collaborator, Desmond Carter. By the time Billie Holiday released her iconic version in 1941, the song had already been released by artists in French, Japanese, Russian and Spanish. Holiday used different English-language lyrics to Robeson, opting instead for those written in 1936 by Sam L. Lewis that he had originally penned for Hal Kemp. Lewis’s lyrics notably attempted to soften the sentiment of the original in a newly added verse that suggested that it was all just a bad dream. And yet, somewhat paradoxically, this version also contained the most explicit mentions of suicide. Thanks to Holiday, Lewis’s version remains the best known, while surely also its most lyrically despairing.
Rumors linking the song to suicide began to circulate as early as the mid 1930s, at first in Hungary, and soon the United States. While possibly apocryphal in nature, stories of people killing themselves after hearing “Gloomy Sunday” have become part of its broader legend. Time and again the same anecdotes are repeated. A 13-year-old boy in Michigan had a neatly folded copy of the lyrics in his pocket that was found after he hung himself in 1936. In London, a woman repeatedly played the record at full volume in her apartment to the annoyance of her neighbours, who found she too had killed herself when they tried to get her to turn it down. An 82-year-old man in New York played the piece on piano, stood up and walked to his 7th floor apartment window where he jumped to his death. A teenage girl in Vienna was found clutching sheet music of the song after throwing herself into a river and drowning.
Of course, the myth that “Gloomy Sunday” triggered mass suicide pivots on a muddled causality. Rather than the song itself causing these suicides, it is more likely that the song hit a particularly sensitive nerve, speaking in a direct way to the broader sense of despair that marked the Great Depression and the horrific poverty and famine that followed in its wake. But the legend has endured, with the story widely believed even today contends that Seress and the girlfriend who inspired the song themselves also counted amongst its victims. The legend holds that not only did she poison herself the day after Seress reached out to her when the song became a hit (her suicide note supposedly simply read “Gloomy Sunday”), but years later, Seress himself would seemingly fall victim to the curse of his own creation. In 1968 – on a Sunday, naturally – Seress hurled himself out the window of his Budapest apartment. While he survived the initial fall, he was believed to have strangled himself to death in the hospital where he was sent for treatment with a piece of wire.
“Gloomy Sunday” was not the first work of art believed to have intrinsically suicidogenic qualities. An outbreak of suicides had been linked to 18th century Japanese Kabuki plays, for example, and a spike in suicides has long been documented following particularly successful performances of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. But in the history of modern popular music, it has no equal. Even songs by musicians with famously devoted youth fan bases– Ozzy Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution” (1980), Metallica’s “Fade to Black” (1984), and Blink 182’s “Adam’s Song” (1999)– have had nowhere near the rumoured hundreds and hundreds of deaths linked to them that “Gloomy Sunday” does, nor do they have its astonishing cross-cultural and transhistorical appeal.
Lunch’s ‘Gloomy Sunday’ specifically offers so much more than just the mythological weight of the supposedly ‘cursed’ song itself. Lunch shakily exhales the lyrics more than she sings them, the familiar roar of underground music’s so-called ‘Godmother of Angry Women’ replaced here with what sounds like the confused delirium of a lost girl-child in her death throes.”
But the power of “Gloomy Sunday” and the aura of death which is so much a part of its story is also, perhaps surprisingly, far from a distant curio. As recently as 2002, BBC Radio in the UK finally lifted a ban on Billie Holiday’s version of the song that had been in place since the early 1940s, driven by fears it would negatively impact wartime morale. While those fears may have been sound at the time, it is unclear why the ban lasted over sixty years– a mere three years after the release of The Blair Witch Project and its soundtrack.
There was, at the end of the century, an almost ambient fascination with this song and its strange story. In Germany, Rolf Schübel’s film Gloomy Sunday – A Song of Love and Death was released in 1999 only months after The Blair Witch Project, a fictional reimagining of the creation of the song and the impact its supposed curse had on its creator’s life. Icelandic art-pop darling Björk released her cover mere weeks before the wide cinema release of The Blair Witch Project, and in the goth space alone there was a wealth of other versions for the soundtrack’s producers to choose from. Christian Death covered it on their 1986 album Atrocities, with charismatic vocalist Gitane Demone recording it again for her 1993 solo album Love for Sale. And in 1992, “Gloomy Sunday” was blessed when the fierce, uncompromising queen of the goth avant-garde Diamanda Galás included it on her vocal-and-piano covers album, The Singer.
If any version of “Gloomy Sunday” was to be used on Josh’s Blair Witch Mix, in many ways Galás’s would have been a more logical selection. Only a few years earlier Galás had an uncharacteristic stamp of mainstream approval bestowed upon her when Trent Reznor mixed her version of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You” (also from The Singer) with Jane’s Addictions “Ted, Just Admit It” on the track “Sex is Violent” for his soundtrack to Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers in 1994. With a vocal range listed anywhere from 3½ to 5 octaves, Galás’s performance style is marked by proudly discordant operatic shrieks and bellows, which– when combined by her dramatic gothic personal style– led to her pithy observation that “I’ve been called a witch in every country I’ve performed in since 1980”. And yet, Galás has also held a long acknowledged space in the more accessible world of dark-edged independent alternative music, alongside Mute Records label mates like Depeche Mode and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
Lydia Lunch was something else entirely. In the 1990s, this was a goddess on a tear, releasing three solo music albums as well as collaborations with fellow underground icons like JG Thirwell and Rowland S. Howard, as well as a series of blistering spoken word albums including Crimes Against Nature (1994), Universal Infiltrators (1996) and Rude Hieroglyphics (1995), the latter with X’s Exene Cervenka. The year before The Blair Witch Project, the two-disc best-of compilation album Widowspeak was released, where “Gloomy Sunday” was a notable absence (“Lady Scarface” was I believe the only track from her solo debut album). But even just on Widowspeak alone, Lunch’s back catalog offered a slew of much grander, more accessible tracks that surely would have made more commercial sense for the soundtrack of the biggest movie success story of the year than her comparatively low-key “Gloomy Sunday”; amongst them, there’s the gothic rock of “Lock Your Door” and “Afraid of Your Company” from 1982’s 13.13 album, or even 1997’s full-throated feminist admonishment “No Excuse”.
Yet Lunch’s “Gloomy Sunday” specifically offers so much more than just the mythological weight of the supposedly ‘cursed’ song itself. Lunch shakily exhales the lyrics more than she sings them, the familiar roar of underground music’s so-called “Godmother of Angry Women” replaced here with what sounds like the confused delirium of a lost girl-child in her death throes. C. Parr wrote of Lunch in their 1993 book On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century that “she came to tell us that the end was near, but not near enough”. But suddenly, in 1999 with the privileged placement of her version of “Gloomy Sunday” at the beginning of the soundtrack for one of the year’s biggest films, we have a very different Lydia Lunch. Here, she is far removed from her then long-established public persona as a kind of underground warrior woman. By the end of the 1990s, it felt like even the most ferocious of us had given up the fight.
This image of Lydia Lunch as a transgressive figure can be traced back well before the release of Queen of Siam. With her early band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks she found in No Wave a band of fellow outsiders with a passion to create their way out of fear and isolation. It was within this small community of DIY filmmakers, artists, and musicians that Lunch flourished. She couldn’t play and she didn’t care; slide guitar appealed to her especially because it was so open to experimentation, and she famously incorporated beer bottles and butter knives into her technique to achieve her then-signature guitar sound. But the music was always secondary to what she had to say and having a pulpit to say it; Lunch has since noted that if more women were doing spoken word when she started out, she probably never would have bothered with music at all.
Teenage Jesus folded in 1979 after a brief but influential few years, the same year Migraine Records released a seven-track self-titled compilation of their work which today largely remains their best known release. That same year, Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban’s label ZE Records put out a 3-track 12″ of the band’s earlier material under the name Pre Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. This marked the beginning of a relationship that would culminate in Lunch’s solo debut album Queen of Siam, which included her cover of “Gloomy Sunday”. The ZE heyday barely lasted seven years, but in that time they issued a small but diverse number of releases that between them played a key yet broadly unacknowledged role in proving that mainstream tastes could bend towards an appreciation of what otherwise had been considered the domain of niche outsiders.
While ZE’s connection to the underground from which Lunch came was also apparent through their relationship with fellow No Wave acts like Mars and Arto Lindsay from DNA, the label could not be pigeonholed. ZE played an important part in the history of electro-punk pioneers Suicide and Alan Vega’s solo work, while at the same time releasing the flamboyant retro-globalist pop of Kid Creole and the Coconuts, the experimental funk of Material, the first two albums of art-funk band Was (Not Was), and the more mainstream New Wave pop of Breakfast Club and the Waitresses’ one-hit wonder, “I Know What Boys Like”. That the latter was released in the same year as Queen of Siam keenly illustrates the diversity of ZE’s output (the label’s success in retrospect no doubt boosted by the enthusiastic promotional efforts of Esteban’s then-girlfriend and soon to be Vogue magazine editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour). John Peel once called ZE “the best independent label in the world”, and while many of the artists whose work they released might not be household names, their legacy is undeniable. Even today ZE’s intuitive sense for just how far the limits of mainstream acceptance could be pushed has remained largely uncredited.
The same passion for heterogeneity that defined ZE lies at the heart of Queen of Siam, a goth cabaret ur-text that reclaimed the traditional torch song by stripping back the melodrama and amplifying acute, undisguised pain. In an era when the postmodern cover song was booming with camp global hits like Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” and Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy”, Lunch’s “Gloomy Sunday” evoked something altogether more sombre in tone. While it reflected both the aura of tragedy that surrounded Billie Holiday and the broader mystique of the song’s own strange history, Lunch took it and made it very much her own.
It was almost twenty years between the original release of Lunch’s version and its inclusion in Josh’s Blair Witch Mix, and its placement at the start of the album was a sharp reminder that even the toughest of us could be cowed by circumstance. Lunch’s “Gloomy Sunday” does more than merely just set the tone for what was to come on Josh’s Blair Witch Mix; it was a declaration of fucking intent. At the end of the 1990s, both the film and the soundtrack spelt out that which we at the time all sought so desperately feared but struggled to articulate: the end is nigh, and some curses cannot be broken.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, a contributing editor to Film International, is a film critic from Melbourne, Australia, who frequently contributes to Fangoria and has published widely on cult, horror and exploitation film including The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (McFarland, 2021), Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011) and the 2021 updated second edition of the same name, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (McFarland, 2015), the single-film focused monographs Suspiria (Auteur, 2016), Ms. 45 (Columbia University Press, 2017) and The Hitcher (Arrow Books, 2018), and two Bram Stoker Award nominated books, Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019) and 1000 Women in Horror (BearManor Media, 2020). She is also the co-editor, with Dean Brandum, of ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Wonderland (Thames & Hudson, 2018) on Alice in Wonderland in film, co-edited with Emma McRae, and Strickland: The Analogues of Peter Strickland (2020) and Cattet & Forzani: The Strange Films of Cattet & Forzani (2018), both co-edited with John Edmond and published by the Queensland Film Festival. Alexandra is on the advisory board of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.