The Blair Witch Project Secretly Used Time Travel – Theory Explained

The Blair Witch Project left the audience wondering what really happened to the three students who got lost in the woods researching the legend of the Blair Witch, and one detail from the official website, along with everything the students went through, makes way for a theory that involves time travel. Back in 1999, The Blair Witch Project arrived to revive the found-footage technique in the horror genre, but not without controversy as its clever marketing campaign made the audience believe that the events in the movie were real, and the three students were either missing or dead.
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The Blair Witch Project follows Heather, Mike, and Josh, three filmmaking students who set out to make a documentary about the mythical Blair Witch, and for that, they travel to Burkittsville, Maryland. After interviewing town residents about the legend of the witch, they go into the forest to see what they can find about the witch, but they soon begin to notice strange stuff happening around them and become lost, which creates a lot of tension and trouble between them. Though neither Josh, Mike, or Heather are killed on-screen nor are their bodies shown, the ending of The Blair Witch Project implies they were killed by a supernatural force, which might have also taken them back in time, explaining why they never made it out of the woods.
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Theory: The Blair Witch Project Protagonists Were Sent Back In Time
One of the most popular theories about The Blair Witch Project and what happened to Heather, Josh, and Mike at the end involves time travel. The theory originated after the audience noticed something strange on the website that was created to promote the movie, which states that, a year after the group went missing, a duffel bag containing film cans, DAT tapes, video cassettes, a Hi-8 video camera, a CP-16 film camera, and Heather’s journal were found “under the foundation of a 100-year-old cabin”, but they had been missing for a year. Since then, various theories suggesting the Blair Witch can manipulate time and space and took Heather, Josh, and Mike back in time when they entered the forest have emerged, as that would be the only way to explain why their tapes and more were found buried underneath the cabin.
One version of the theory goes into detail about how time was altered in the woods while Heather, Josh, and Mike were there, suggesting that during the first night, there was a time shift and they were taken back to the 1940s. According to the timeline of events on the official Blair Witch Project website, between November 1940 and May 1941, seven kids were abducted from the area surrounding Burkittsville, and on May 25, 1941, a hermit called Rustin Parr claimed that he was “finally finished”. The police found that Parr had kidnapped and killed the children in his secluded house in the woods, and he used to make one of the kids face the wall while he killed another, explaining that he did what he did for “an old woman ghost”. Back to the theory, if Heather, Josh, and Mike were taken back to the 1940s, then the cabin they entered was Parr’s, and they became their victims. The tapes were transported in a final time shift to before the cabin was built, thus why their equipment was found “buried under the foundation” of the cabin.
The Blair Witch Project’s Fictional Legend Explained
In addition to the above-mentioned timeline of events, the production team behind The Blair Witch Project also came up with a full legend about their fictional Blair Witch. According to it, it all started in 1785, when Blair resident Elly Kedward was accused of witchcraft by several children and found guilty. As a result, she was banished from Blair and sentenced to death by exposure during a particularly harsh winter, though she was still hung from a tree with stones tied to her limbs. A year later, Kedward’s accusers and half of the town’s children vanish, which was believed to be Kedward’s/the witch’s doing, and so the townspeople fled Blair and vowed to never say Elly Kedward’s name again. That was the beginning of many tragedies in Blair/Burkittsville, and Kedwards is believed to be the Blair Witch. However, neither their myth nor the subsequent tragedies mention time traveling nor any strange occurrences involving time, though that might be an ability of the witch that only her victims would know about.
Who Was The Killer In The Blair Witch Project?
The time travel theory can give an answer to the big question of who was the killer in The Blair Witch Project, but if Parr killed Heather, Josh, and Mike as the theory suggests, their bodies would have been found decades ago, yet they were supposedly never recovered. The big question of who was the real killer stands, and while it might seem obvious that it was the Blair Witch who killed the group, there are details throughout the movie that point to other possibilities. Among the theories on who the killer is in The Blair Witch Project are some that suggest it was the spirit of one of Parr’s victims, Josh under the influence of the witch, or Mike, also under the control of the witch. The Blair Witch Project left a lot of loose ends, enough to keep viewers talking about the movie for years, and while the time travel theory doesn’t sound too far-fetched, it doesn’t fully solve the movie’s mysteries.
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