 to another episode of Frightfully Forgotten Horror Movies. But before we get started, what are we drinking? Today we are drinking Blake's Gold. It's a golden Belgian ale. Today we're gonna do something a little different and we're not gonna do a movie per se, but we're going to cover 1999's Curse of the Blair Witch. Curse of the Blair Witch was a made for TV fake documentary about the Blair Witch and about the town of Blair in Berkinsville sent out to TV stations to promote the movie before it came out. Whoever made this watched their unsolved mysteries. They watched their in search of. They knew how to make a fucking documentary that looked legit and scary. Black and white footage panning through the woods in this creepy voice. They say the Blair Witch was Ellie Kedward and she was banished. You're banished! In the winter and was supposed to have frozen to death, the next year all of her accusers and half of the town's children had gone missing. It takes us right to footage of the student's family and friends telling you about them and telling you about how they came up with the idea to make this little project, the Blair Witch project. Very convincing. And then it cuts to news footage saying that three students have gone missing in the woods who are making this Blair Witch documentary. Then it takes us back in time. It shows historians start talking about the history of Berkinsville, which is formerly known as Blair. The town was created to defend the Western approaches to Baltimore. There's a historian that says there was a lot of witch trials happening at the time. There was the Belwich in Tennessee. He says there was also the Blair Witch and they show actual ship manifests of Ellie Kedward coming from Ireland into Blair. Apparently Ellie was accused of bloodletting some children, probably just because she thought they were sick and she was accused of witchcraft. So the town went and rounded her up and banished her. You're banished! To the black hole! You're grown as steel! They banished her to the woods in the winter time and some say well she was banished and they just left her out to the cold. Some say they took her out and tied her to a tree. And that all happened in 1785. It fast-forwards to 1825 and there's a railroad being built. The railroad kinda came close to the old town of Blair and one of the guys who was in the party that found the town was named Birket. So they called it Birketsville. The town was resettled. There was a little girl playing in Tappy East Creek and the creek was only like a foot deep. It was like a child could wade across. It was so shallow. There's eyewitness of a ghostly white hand coming up through the water and grabbing this child and pulling her down and underneath the rocks. No one found the body in the stream. That's shallow! No! They told me the stream was shallow! The creek turned all oily and you couldn't drink from it and there's stick figures floating in it. It fast-forwards again to 1886. There's another story of a child met a woman in the woods. She was floating and took her back to her house in the woods and took her all the way into the basement and just left her there and told her that she'll be back. They say after a number of hours, the child got scared, which after hours? Hours after maybe two minutes! Get the fuck outta here! Or even before that, you see somebody floating. It's like, ah, I'm outta here. I'm not going to the basement in the first damn place. You floating bitch! Ha ha ha ha! While the child was in the house, a search party from Birkitsville was sent out. What ended up happening was the first search party ended up just going missing. So they had to send out a second search party to go look for that first one and the girl, I guess. The second search party stumbled upon the first search party at Coffin Rock or as one of the old historians, Coffin Hill. Yeah. And Coffin Rock. I kinda like that, you know? Two different names for it. Yeah, it's kinda neat. Yeah, it's neat. They were all bound together. They were all disemboweled and they all had weird symbols carved into their faces. Where they were bound, you could see marks and so they were still alive while all that stuff was going on. Something surfaces again in 1940. This bomb, I guess, this hermit guy named Rustin Parr. The story goes with him is that he ended up leading a lot of children and he lured them into his basement with candy. He heard voices of a woman in his ear telling him to do this and he ended up killing these kids one by one. And he always made the one kid stand in the corner of the basement facing the wall. That's right. Well, he killed the other kid. Because he couldn't stand the eyes on him. It fast forwards again to 1994 where they actually find all of this lost footage from the three students that went missing in the Black Hills area searching for the Blair Witch. It was found sort of in the foundations of an old house. A lot of the people in the documentary are sort of theorizing that they're like, well, how could this have been? It's almost as if the footage has materialized which is not possible. That's kind of like where the documentary ends and they say now the movie is coming out that is the footage we found. Perfect. It's the perfect setup because it makes you want to see this footage. The main reason we're talking about Curse of the Blair Witch is because nobody talks about it. A special piece in a horror history where it was made for TV fake documentary made to promote the movie. Yeah. And it's kind of neat where they put so much time and effort into this to really build the history of the Blair Witch. Like they went into huge detail. Also a very believable documentary. You look at it now, we just kind of rewatched it. It's so good. It stands up like it looks legit. It looks like a real documentary that was made for TV, any style documentary. The fake illustrations of the Blair Witch. Arms spread out. It's fucking frightening. Yeah. And it looks like an old drawing, you know? There are some people that tell a story one way and then it shows another guy who tells it a little different. Lends credence to the fact that it's real. Like the fact that there's not just one way that the story's told. They always have two sides of the story as well. One person believes it, one person doesn't. There's a skeptic in it too. And so you're like, okay, well. It makes it seem more like a real documentary. Exactly. Because you start to question it. Even the names Black Rock Road is where they found the car. The Black Hills is where they went missing. It's often raw. Yeah, like even Burkittsville or Blair, the town of Blair. Sounds kind of scary. Yeah, it's a little geary. All the news footage that they use in this, the footage of Rustin Parr in 1940. And his mug shots and everything. Yeah, and he looks weird. He looks like a weird creepy hermit. And the news footage looks like it's from 1940. Yeah. Like this doesn't look fake. But if you pass forward to the present day with the news footage of the children gone missing and there's a search out for them. Yeah. We all believed that. Yeah, totally. Because it looked fucking real. It looked real, it looked legit. And it was scary. You get all these little subtle things in the movie which you would never get without watching this documentary. It makes the movie more real. All for sure, yeah. Like everything in the movie is real because of this documentary. Yeah. And because of this fake documentary. I remember watching this documentary for the first time. I remember where it was. I remember it was in my dad's place in that big green chair from the TV. And this documentary came on. And holy fuck. Did it scare the living shit out of me? Yeah. I could not sleep that night as scared as I was. I still wanted to see the movie. Yeah. That is exactly why they made this documentary. Exactly, yeah. I also remember the commercials for this. Them showing the news footage of the search parties and stuff like that. When these kids, people have gone missing. It's like, what's this all about? And then the fucking documentary came on. It's like, holy shit. You have to watch this now because then you're gonna learn. And I fucking taped it. Like I actually taped it and I cut the commercials out and everything. Like super meticulous. It's a moment in history that I don't think we'll ever be able to mimic or ever get back. If you've never seen Curse of the Blair Witch, if you've only ever seen the Blair Witch project, we urge you to watch Curse of the Blair Witch and then watch the Blair Witch project. Yeah. And you'll appreciate, I think, the Blair Witch project even more. So, till the next time, keep drinking.