Laura Henriksen on “4 Alternate Endings to The Blair Witch Project

The serial poem, according to the great serial poet Fanny Howe, attempts to demonstrate “attention to what is cyclical, returning, but empty at its axis.” She further explains, “To me, the serial poem is a spiral poem.” This is the kind of serial poem I hoped to write when approaching one of my favorite videos on the internet, The Blair Witch Project 4 alternative endings. This video was posted in 2017 to a Blair Witch Project fan channel called Delta, along with a number of other extended or deleted scenes and outtakes, and also one thirty second video called simply “can11,” where a camera pans in on a pile of bones in the woods, black and white footage grainy to the point of abstraction.

I wanted to write a spiral poem about The Blair Witch Project because I have always been compelled by (or really, scared of) the folded time that ensnares our three unlucky film student protagonists, Mike, Josh, and Heather, in the Maryland woods. The events of the movie take place in what, three days? Three days in the woods, plus one interviewing locals in town. And once their hike begins the days seem to pass so quickly, lost to loops, dread, and wandering, the sun always about to set, the hours consumed by the nights that follow to unpeel them into noise and violence. Like the woods, like the witch, time here is a yawning vacuum, voracious, empty at its axis. I’m interested in how this spooky temporality relates to my experience of the film, both as a timeless work of storytelling, and also as a very specific technological artifact of a very specific cultural moment. The Blair Witch is beyond time, and the Blair Witch is 1999, both things are true. I’m interested, too, in the narrative compulsion to fill in, to supplement and demystify, an impulse I obviously succumb to at times as well, looking at Blair Witch fan YouTube channels for bonus footage, reading fake historical documents about fictional people. Uncertainty is a difficult kind of abundance relative to the easy abundance of fan theories.

To be honest, I’m also quite fond of Book of Shadows: The Blair Witch 2. It came out barely a year after the original, and is by basically every standard a disaster, ridiculous, even though the premise is pretty perfect (The Blair Witch Project came out, and obsessed fans have descended on Burkittsville, creating a situation for which neither local nor tourist is prepared). Despite my pleasure in the sequel, which is a pleasure in post-Y2K excess and chaos, I remain more deeply compelled by this 6 minute video on YouTube of alternate endings. Each “alternative” that we are offered is little more than a visual refraction of the original, the same ending, actually, but with different decorative elements. Nothing is transformed, just rearranged. A cycle, repetition with variation. Like The Blair Witch Project, it’s relentless, we hear Mike and Heather screaming over and over again, rushing to a basement of inevitable doom. The promise of the video’s title, the possibility of a whole new ending, or many new endings, is totally evacuated. The betrayal feels sort of cruel, which makes sense to me, given the storied cruelty of the film’s production, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez just sort of tormenting their actors for eight days in Seneca Creek State Park. And so, like the enfolding time of the woods outside Burkittsville, like the alternate endings which provide, finally, no alternative, I wanted to write a poem that felt stuck, non-productive, endlessly tumbling downwards through ruins, only to arrive again at the threshold.