The Blair Witch Project ending explained: the witch may never have touched them

The Blair Witch Project opened in 1999, made about $248 million worldwide and is still the found-footage movie every other one gets compared to. Lionsgate and Blumhouse's new version, directed by Dylan Clark, is dated for September 24, 2027, per The Hollywood Reporter, with original stars Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams as executive producers.

The remake inherits one of the most argued-about endings in horror. Full spoilers from here.

What happens in the last minutes

Heather, Mike and Josh go into the Maryland woods to film a documentary about the Blair Witch and get hopelessly lost. Mike kicks their map into a creek, stick figures appear in the trees, and one morning Josh is gone. At night, Heather and Mike hear him screaming somewhere in the dark.

On their last night, they follow Josh's voice to an abandoned house with children's handprints on the walls.

Mike runs down to the basement and something knocks his camera to the floor. Heather follows him down and finds Mike standing in the corner, facing the wall, ignoring her screams. Then something hits her, the camera drops, and the movie ends.

Why Mike is facing the wall

The answer comes from the interviews at the start of the film. Locals tell the crew about Rustin Parr, a hermit who killed seven children in his house in the woods in the 1940s. He took them to his basement in pairs and made one stand in the corner, facing the wall, while he killed the other.

So the ending is a replay of Parr's ritual. Mike is the child in the corner, and Heather is the one who doesn't get to turn around.

That interview wasn't in the original cut. After the film's Sundance screening, distributor Artisan wanted a clearer ending, and the directors added it so the audience would have a clue. Eduardo Sánchez told Eye for Film it was the one interview that "explains why Mike is standing in the corner."

The scariest thing in the movie is a man standing still. Nobody has to show you what happened to him.

Why the witch may never have touched them

The killer the locals actually describe is a man. Rustin Parr was human, and in the lore built for the film's website and the Sci-Fi Channel mockumentary Curse of the Blair Witch, he confessed and blamed a voice he said could have been the witch.

That's the pattern the movie leaves you with:

• The corner ritual: It's Parr's method, not a witch's.
• The bait: The voice that leads Heather and Mike into the house sounds exactly like Josh.
• Mike: He's standing on his own two feet, alive, choosing not to turn around.
• The attacks: Both cameras get knocked down by something the lens never catches.

Read that way, whatever lives in those woods doesn't need hands. It got Parr to do its killing in the 1940s, and it may be doing the same thing through whoever is in that basement with Heather. Fans have spent years arguing that Josh or Mike was in on it, and the film leaves enough room for that too.

The directors have never settled it, on purpose. Sánchez told Giant Bomb the team wanted no witch climbing "out of the floor," and he couldn't define her himself.

"If you asked us, 'what is the Blair Witch?' I couldn't answer that."

— Eduardo Sánchez, co-director, to Giant Bomb

Even the one moment that was supposed to show something didn't. Daniel Myrick told LADbible that a crew member in white long johns was meant to appear between the trees during the famous tent scene. Heather reacted to him, and the camera missed him completely.

Don't miss: 1408 ending explained: it has four endings, and streaming doesn't give you the one theaters did

The endings they threw out

Artisan wanted more than a clue, so Myrick and Sánchez went back to the house and shot alternate endings, including Mike hanging from a noose and Mike crucified on one of the stick figures, they told Entertainment Weekly. They took everything to the executives and argued for the original.

"What makes us fearful is something that's out of the ordinary, unexplained."

— Daniel Myrick, co-director, to Entertainment Weekly

Artisan let them keep it. They had come up with the corner just three days before shooting it.

The sequel that turned it into a rule

Adam Wingard's 2016 sequel, Blair Witch, gave the corner a new job. In its version of the legend, as Roger Ebert's site noted, you can't look the witch in the face without dying of fear. Facing the wall becomes a way to survive, and characters die when they turn around.

That sequel reads Mike's last moment as obedience to a rule. The 1999 original never explains it.

Our read

The witch in The Blair Witch Project is a rumor with a body count. Everything we actually see is done by people or by something off camera, and that's why the ending still works 27 years later.

The new film has a September 2027 date and a lot of mythology to choose from. The original's lesson is to leave Mike facing the wall and never show what's behind Heather.

Previously we wrote: Percy Jackson and the Olympians in order: the books are numbered 1 to 7 — don't read them that way