The Blair Witch Project‘s filmmakers found a way to use the web to their advantage, spreading their mythology at a time when verifying its accuracy was still difficult. Before the advent of YouTube and social media, the structure of the net in 1999 provided a platform for information to be shared, but not at the speed and efficiency we enjoy today. The film came along at just the right moment in the web’s history.
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Word of it spread across the internet and seeped into newspapers and TV reports, turning The Blair Witch Project into one of the most talked-about films of the summer. Last, and most importantly, the trailers showed the address for the Blair Witch website.Īll told, Artisan spent around $25 million on the campaign, and while news of the film’s hoax status was already beginning to circulate by the time The Blair Witch Project began its general theatrical run in July 1999, the marketing had already done its job. Brief, low-fi teaser trailers showed tantalizing snippets of footage – not least actress Heather Donahue’s terrorised face, an image which would soon become famous.
A documentary on the Sci-Fi Channel further blurred the line between fiction and reality. Gradually, word of these disappearances and the resulting footage spread, with speculation fanned further by Artisan’s refusal to advertise the film conventionally. The students failed to return, and a subsequent police search unearthed only a few clues as to their whereabouts – the most significant find being a buried duffle bag containing various audio tapes and videos, which formed the basis of The Blair Witch Project film. But there was one thing that was new about The Blair Witch Project: its marketing campaign.Īround six months before Blair Witch was first screened at Sundance in January 1998, directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick launched a website, which sketched in the background details of their story: in October 1994, three film students went off to make a documentary about a local legend concerning witches and a child-snatching hermit called Rustin Parr. It certainly wasn’t the first piece of American horror to present itself as a true story, either – Edgar Allan Poe was passing tales off as fact in the 19th century. The Blair Witch Projectwasn’t the first found-footage film ever made, and neither was it the only such film released in the late ’90s.
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Those grainy images, edited down to around 90 minutes over the course of eight months, would eventually become The Blair Witch Project, a $22,000 movie which went on to make more than $248 million at the box office. In October 1997, a small group of young actors and filmmakers emerged from a state park in Maryland with approximately 19 hours of rough, handheld video footage.