It is this latter fact that brought me back to the state of my birth. For the second year in a row, the town of Burkittsville, Maryland, was hosting a special screening of the movie that made it famous.
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| She said that this is how authors sit. |
The 1999 found footage flick was set and partially filmed (very partially—basically, the graveyard scene) in this tiny intersection of a town about 50 miles northwest of D.C.
This event seemed to represent a major shift in attitude from some people in the town toward The Blair Witch Project. Its residents used to hate it. And not just because of what she did to their children. It was because of the type of attention the groundbreaking film brought to the rural nineteenth-century hamlet. When the movie debuted, people flooded the town, stole its welcome signs, overpopulated the graveyard and its nonexistent downtown, asking residents over and over again if the Blair Witch was real, and generally being a nuisance in a town without even so much as a storefront to repurpose into a souvenir stand.
I was certainly a part of that chaos. I was living a town or so over when the sequel, Book of Shadows, came out. Me and some friends caught the flick and then broke for Burkittsville to see if we could see the town and then camp in its woods for the night. However, it was cordoned off by the authorities, so we camped in nearby Boonsboro.
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| Ed Swanson, one of the fishermen from the movie. |
Today, the town still has no commerce and has redesigned its welcome signs so that they don’t match the ones from the movie to prevent theft. And they mostly have just kept their heads down as the mania waned over the years, shuddering slightly whenever a sequel is announced.
And then Mayor Mike happened. Michael J. Robinson, a Virginia transplant to the town, got elected mayor a few years ago. Inadvertently, I think. And mostly for the sash of office he gets to wear (sadly, no top hat). MJR is a massive movie fan (in his official photo on the Burkittsville website, he’s sporting an “Evans City Cemetery” T-shift) and couldn’t stand that the town he lived in and now mayor’d over was not celebrating such a unique connection to cinema.
Last year, he organized the first ever public screening of the movie in town. This was a personal venture on his part and not technically affiliated with the town. But he knew it needed to happen.
And I didn’t go.
And that was a mistake.
I’m a big Blair Witch fan, a Maryland guy, and I lived for like five years in that specific area of the state. Also, MJR is a friend of mine. At our first meeting eons ago, he was brandishing a Ravenous poster. Like I said, a massive movie fan.
This year, I righted that mistake. But only because MJR reached out to me and offered some table space at the event to vend some books. “Of course,” I said. “And just let me know when you have the details of the event, and I’ll share it around the socials.”
“Oh, we’re already sold out,” he said.
So last weekend, I drove ten hours with my daughters to hang out with more than 150 people on the grounds of the Burkittsville Ruritan Club, less than half a mile from the graveyard featured in the movie (and which was the beneficiary of the night’s fundraising).
It was a blast. The weather was amazing, there were lots of cool people there. I tabled for a while (although I always find it hard to stay behind a table), met a few readers who brought throwback books like The New York Grimpendium and A Season with the Witch, sold some of my new book, Cult Following, hung out with my girls, met an OTIS Club Member from Sleepy Hollow, saw people in person whose podcasts I’d guested on, met out interviewees from the beginning of the movie and its director Eduardo Sanchez.
After a short Q&A with those above relevants, it was time for the highlight of the night.
As darkness fell, bats wheeling above our heads and the surrounding cornfields waving ominously, everybody slumped into camp chairs or sprawled on blankets on the lawn. The screen up against the club building lit up with a restored version of the film, 25 years after it debuted.
Everybody cheered when the Welcome to Burkittsville sign appeared.
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| Susie Gooch and her daughter, interviewees from the beginning of the movie. |
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| Eduardo Sanchez, one of the two directors of the movie. |
