In 1999, “The Blair Witch Project” became the first found-footage horror movie super-hit, grossing over $248 million against a shoestring original budget of $60,000. The narrative of film students Heather (Heather Donahue), Mike (Michael Williams), and Josh (Joshua Leonard) disappearing into the woods of Maryland while being stalked by the legendary entity they were investigating is enticing, and the found footage method makes its events oddly believable.

The cast of “The Blair Witch Project” improvised their way across a rough plot framework, leading to natural performances from the three unknown actors. It also helped that the titular Blair Witch is never actually seen in the movie, which relies on creepy sounds, stick formations, and general atmosphere to keep things creepy. History has shown how well the approach worked, but it may also cause the viewer to wonder precisely what the three doomed youngsters are running from. Here’s a closer look at the Blair Witch and her true nature.

In “The Blair Witch Project” lore, the titular character was originally an 18th-century woman named Elly Kedward who lived in Blair, Maryland. While she’s not based on a real, verifiable person, the fictional Elly’s grim fate bears certain similarities to the legend of Moll Dyer – a Maryland woman who was accused of witchcraft during the difficult winter of 1697. As the story goes, she was driven away from her home and was later found frozen on top of a large rock.

Per production designer Ben Rock, the film’s supernatural Blair Witch also drew inspiration from the 19th-century Bell Witch legend from Tennessee. In this well-documented but murky case, a mysterious witch started haunting a man called John Bell and his family in 1817, causing numerous terrifying events while constantly mocking the family with its disembodied voice. As the story has it, the entity meddled with the family’s affairs, liked some family members more than others, and went as far as to fatally poison Mr. Bell in 1820.

Before becoming the Blair Witch, Elly Kedward was banished by her community following accusations of witchcraft in 1785. Some say she disappeared into the forest and died, while others tell a far more grim tale of her demise. According to the latter version, the people of Blair tied her to a tree, and their children later tortured her to death before ultimately hanging her. Regardless of what happened, the town’s children soon started disappearing following her demise. People fled, and the legend of the Blair Witch was born.

The witch would resurface every 50 years or so to do more evil. By 1825, Blair was known as Burkittsville, and the Blair Witch rose again to kill a 10-year-old girl and temporarily poison the town’s water supply. In 1886, an eight-year-old girl encountered an eerie old woman who led her to a scary basement. She eventually escaped, but the Blair Witch murdered a search party in an area known as Coffin Rock. Yet another half-century went by, and, in 1940, the witch forced a reclusive man called Rustin Parr to kill seven Burkittsville children and surrender to the police.

This backstory unravels across the franchise, with each movie sprinkling bits and pieces of information about the witch here and there. Her next awakening seems to be in 1994, when she starts stalking Heather, Mike, and Josh, ultimately taking them all. From that point on, the Blair Witch becomes more active than usual. In “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,” she may or may not possess a group of “Blair Witch Project” enthusiasts to perform a new massacre at Coffin Rock in 1999. In 2014, she hunts Heather’s brother James (James Allen McCune) and his friends who venture into the Burkittsville woods to investigate Heather’s disappearance.

Honestly? No one knows what the Blair Witch really looks like, including “The Blair Witch Project” directors Eduardo Sànchez and Dan Myrick. “We were thinking maybe we could show somebody levitating or have arms coming out of the walls,” Sànchez told Bloody Disgusting. “I mean, we had no idea, but we didn’t want to betray the rest of the movie. There are no real gags in the movie, we weren’t showing anything, you know, except a bundle of sticks and some teeth. And then maybe two or three days before we had to shoot the ending we came up with the idea for the ending. Also, [producer Gregg Hale] came up to us and said ‘You can’t do any art department, you can’t come up with an idea that requires any building or anything.’ So we were lucky we came up with the idea and it worked well.”

As it stands, “The Blair Witch Project” doesn’t show the witch to the viewer, opting instead to go all in on “less is more” scares. The clearest visual of a supernatural creature in the franchise is in 2016’s “Blair Witch,” which ends in the infamous Rustin Parr house from “The Blair Witch Project.” Here, Lisa Arlington (Callie Hernandez) catches glimpses of a long-limbed, emaciated creature that stalks the corridors. Then again, this slender creature isn’t quite in line with other descriptions of the Blair Witch, who is said to be a shawl-wearing woman whose body is covered in black fur. In 2001, Todd McFarlane’s McFarlane Toys released an even wilder action figure interpretation that depicts the witch as a red-eyed, ghoulish beast with sharp teeth and a primitive scythe.

Not one of these, of course, has been confirmed as the definitive version of the Blair Witch’s appearance. If anything, the franchise tends to imply that the witch might be a disembodied, possibly shape-shifting malevolent force instead of a physical being.

We will see the Blair Witch again. As the original movie demonstrates, the Blair Witch is one of those characters — or rather, concepts — that can be used to make a scary movie for a very small budget. This, combined with her pop culture recognition, always meant a high likelihood of her eventual return.

The next Blair Witch movie is already on the way, as it happens. In April 2024, Lionsgate Films announced that Blumhouse Productions is working on a new take on the witchy legend, along with other as-yet unnamed takes on Lionsgate’s horror back catalog. “I’m a huge admirer of ‘The Blair Witch Project,’ which brought the idea of found footage horror to mainstream audiences and became a true cultural phenomenon,” Blumhouse CEO Jason Blum said about the deal at CinemaCon 2024 (via Empire). “I don’t think there would have been a ‘Paranormal Activity’ had there not first been a ‘Blair Witch,’ so this feels like a truly special opportunity and I’m excited to see where it leads.”

The new movie is overseen by Blum himself and Roy Lee, who produced 2016’s “Blair Witch.” There’s no word on when it will premiere or how it will treat the mythos, but considering how good the best Blumhouse movies are, there’s certainly plenty of potential.