Daniel Myrick is most persuasive when the camera cannot explain what frightens his characters. The Blair Witch Project remains our reason to seek him out: an excellent horror film whose roughness is purposeful, even when the panic becomes repetitive.
Fi1m perspective
The camera keeps looking into the woods, but another look does not make them any easier to read. In The Blair Witch Project (1999), Daniel Myrick and co-director Eduardo Sánchez deny us the reassuring view that might explain what their characters are seeing. We were unsettled by those ordinary trees, because the film had made us search them for something we could not identify. That is the strongest case for Myrick as a horror director: he can make watching an apparently empty picture uncomfortable. He and Sánchez achieve it without giving the witch legend a convenient set of rules.
Production designer Ben Rock keeps the woods looking unprepared for a fright, which matters more here than an elaborate setting would. Myrick favours improvised performances within carefully mapped situations, giving actors freedom without leaving everything to chance. In The Blair Witch Project, that approach makes the distress convincing, but it also needs firm editing. Myrick and Sánchez edit the film themselves, and they let some exchanges run beyond the point at which the panic has registered. We would lose a little dialogue and trust the frightened voices to have done their work.
The films that follow keep him close to supernatural and paranormal subjects. Both Solstice (2007) and Believers (2007) continue his work in horror, while The Objective (2008) tries a military science-fiction setting. The latter attempts to carry techniques from The Blair Witch Project into another genre, suggesting an interest in testing where that approach might work beyond the woods. By Skyman (2019), a UFO film made in documentary style, he has returned to the form most closely associated with him.
Later work has often been judged against The Blair Witch Project and found wanting. That comparison needs care: the achievement we admire was shared with Sánchez, and the rough pictures were only part of what made it frightening. Ben Rock's ordinary surroundings and the writers' unwillingness to explain the legend matter just as much; a handheld camera alone cannot do that work. Start with The Blair Witch Project, and allow for a little more arguing in the woods than the film needs.
Biography
Daniel Myrick is an American film director, writer and editor. He co-directed, co-wrote and edited the 1999 found-footage horror film The Blair Witch Project with Eduardo Sánchez. The micro-budget production became a major commercial success and popularised the found-footage style.
Myrick was born in Sarasota, Florida. He graduated from the University of Central Florida School of Film in 1994. Before his feature debut he worked as an editor and cinematographer on Florida-based music videos and commercials.
His other directing credits include the horror films Solstice (2008), The Objective (2008) and Believers (2007). With Sánchez he received the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award for The Blair Witch Project.
