Even after attending the theater, moviegoers believed “The Blair Witch Project” to be a true story. In a time before social media, the age of information, constant communication and fake news, no one had any reason to question any of this. “We were specifically not invited to the Cannes premiere, and for a while, were listed as deceased on IMDb,” said actor Joshua Leonard in an interview. Sanchez and Myrick went so far as to go around in person posting missing persons flyers that instructed anyone who saw the actors to call the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office. On July 11, 1999, months before the release, SyFy aired an hour-long special, Curse of the Blair Witch, a fictional documentary on Burkittsville, Maryland and the ghost that had haunted it, and reported three students missing. The internet was in a sweet spot where it was just becoming widely used and reputable, but not so much so as to allow people to find the truth or discredit the site. They used the actor’s real names, biographies, and childhood photos, and posted faux police reports and news clippings reporting the actors as missing. In 1998, a year before it was even set to release, Sanchez and Myrick created a website devoted to the backstory of their fictional characters.
What really made “The Blair Witch Project” effective, however, was what was perhaps the first viral marketing campaign. Real emotion was caught on film, and that makes “The Blair Witch Project” work as well as it does. One of the directors explained in another interview: “Somehow they trusted us enough to let us, you know, kind of mess with them and build this world around them.” Although the plot was fictional, the actors felt alone in the dark woods with nothing but cameras and scary sounds. Then there were the “gags” we’d pull at night that they had to react to – like hearing the children’s voices, or feeling the tent being shaken.”
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Don’t take no for an answer.’ Or: ‘Josh, somewhere along the way today, you’ve had it with this bull-.’ They had the freedom to decide how to play it: we only intervened if we felt they needed to tone things down. In an interview with The Guardian, Myrick said that they “would say things like: ‘Heather, you’re absolutely sure that to get out of this mess you go south. The directors and producers interacted with the actors as little as possible, usually only to scare them or deliver new film canisters for their cameras. Everything was improvised, giving “The Blair Witch Project” the authentic feel for which it is held in high regard.
Their “script” was a 35-page outline with absolutely no dialogue. The three aspiring actors were left mostly alone in the woods of Maryland after only a two-day “film school” on camera work. Williams, and Joshua Leonard – were chosen, production began. When the actors – Heather Donahue, Michael C. Sanchez explains that in order to find the right actors for the job, the audition process was simply one of improvisation the actors and actresses were told they were in front of a parole board, and needed to plead a case for early release from an 18-year prison sentence. It wasn’t until 1997, however, that Sanchez and Myrick began casting the movie.
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The movie was shot and aggressively marketed as “found footage.” The actors themselves filmed their fictional interviews with the townspeople and their trek into the Maryland woods with handheld cameras.ĭirectors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick first conceived the idea of a “found-footage” horror movie as film students at the University of Central Florida in 1991. “The Blair Witch Project” tells the (purportedly true) story of three student filmmakers investigating the local legend of the Blair Witch in the Black Hills of Burkittsville, Maryland. It’s one of the most successful independent movies of all time. It was sold to Artisan Entertainment for $1.1 million just hours later and eventually grossed $248 million in the box office worldwide. “The Blair Witch Project,” made by two directors and three unknown actors on a budget of $60,000 premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. By Madison Cushing, Collegian Correspondent
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