A Ghostly Bones Episode Was Inspired By The Blair Witch Project

The 1999 summer movie season was one for the history books. It saw the release of the first "Star Wars" film in well over a decade, "Austin Powers" went from VHS success to bonafide blockbuster, and an unknown director named M. Night Shyamalan came out of nowhere to deliver the second-highest grossing title of the year. "The Sixth Sense" would've been that year's definitive work of horror, too, had it not been for "The Blair Witch Project." Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's shoestring-budgeted phenomenon, which premiered just a few weeks before young Haley Joel Osment saw dead people, was inescapable. Heather Donahue's terrified, teary-eyed confession to her camera in the film instantly became a widely-recognized piece of iconography alongside the movie's maddening final shot, both of which would soon be referenced and parodied in virtually equal measure.

By the time "Bones" had rolled onto Fox in 2005, the hoopla around "The Blair Witch Project" had died down and the marketplace was no longer quite so saturated with homages and knockoffs. Perhaps that's why Hart Hanson and his creative team felt comfortable tipping their hat to the film with season 2's "The Headless Witch in the Woods." The episode debuted on November 29, 2006, but it was clearly intended for the spooky season. Indeed, it would've aired the day after Halloween had Fox not put the series on a month-long hiatus at the start of October.

Much of "The Headless Witch in the Woods" takes clear inspiration from the plot and in-universe mythology of "The Blair Witch Project" in-between the more character-focused moments. And while its director, "The X-Files" alum Tony Wharmby, and writers Stephen Nathan and Karine Rosenthal didn't go so far as to make the entire episode found-footage, they still found a way to incorporate that aspect of the movie.

"The Headless Witch in the Woods" is perhaps "Bones" at its most "X-Files"-ish, pitting Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan's (Emily Deschanel) hardline skepticism against her relatively agnostic crew over a case involving a mysterious death in a forest said to be haunted by the specter of an accused witch beheaded centuries ago. At one point, even the typically level-headed Cam (Tamara Taylor) spills her guts about the time her mother visited her from beyond the grave ... or so she imagined. The rest of the "Bones" team prove just as skittish. It doesn't help that strange occurrences keep piling up, from the unexplained appearance of ominous talismans in the woods to the disturbing, confounding footage captured by the murder victim, himself a film school student.

The "Blair Witch Project" influence should be glaringly obvious by this point, although it manifests itself most plainly in the episode's amateur-documentary-gone-wrong subplot. In Paul Ruditis' "Bones: The Official Companion," director of photography Gordon Lonsdale said the episode's second unit sought to shoot the recovered footage in the exact same manner as Myrick and Sánchez's horror classic. "It was a handheld camera the whole time," Lonsdale noted, which is readily evident in its shaky, unfocused quality. That and the sight of petrified young people filming themselves as they run around at night can't help but evoke Donahue and her castmates' flights of terror.

Tempting as it surely was to go fully supernatural, "The Headless Witch in the Woods" ultimately ends with the reveal that its killer is nothing more than a run-of-the-mill human. It does, however, leave a little room for doubt about the existence or lack thereof of the titular ghost in one of its final scenes — because what's a Halloween-adjacent outing without a last-minute scare?