In this FandomWire Video Essay, we explore how The Blair Witch Project TRICKED everybody.
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The Blair Witch Project TRICKED Audiences
This… isn’t real. But for a time, the vast majority of movie-going audiences believed it was. This is The Blair Witch Project. A documentary-style film that utilized one of the most ingenious marketing campaigns ever devised to trick MILLIONS of moviegoers, and effectively launched a cinema trend that would last for decades. A touchstone of 90s pop culture, and subsequently one of the most successful independent movies of all time. The Blair Witch Project debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in January of 1999, but it was the mass hysteria and heated debates amongst general audiences that would forever change the landscape of horror, blending the realms of fiction and reality in a way that no other horror film had managed to do before… or since.
But how did it do it? How did a micro-budget horror film consisting of complete unknowns, both behind the camera and in front of it, manage to convince audiences that these three students had fallen victim to a real-life witch in Maryland? AND that the very film we were watching was the actual footage they’d recorded upon meeting their horrible end? Well, that’s a story almost as wild as the tale of the Blair Witch itself. So, pitch your tent and grab your camcorder as we explore How the Blair Witch tricked EVERYBODY.
Its images are permanently seared into the collective memories of any 90s baby, even without showing the ghoulish figure at the core of its story. While it’s often considered to be a divisive film, having both a strong group of devoted fans and an equal group of devout nay-sayers, there is no denying its impact. The influence it would have on the film landscape at large is one that’s still present today. Given its completely unconventional filmmaking process, pioneering viral marketing in a major way, and extensive mythology-building supplemental materials, The Blair Witch Project is truly a relic of its time, coming into the horror realm at the exact moment that a trick like this could be believably pulled off.
Without Reddit, without message boards and pages upon pages of movie threads, there was no way to truly disprove The Blair Witch Project’s existence or nonexistence. Everyone thought it was real, so much so that the police even wanted to get involved to help make a speedy resolution to the alleged missing persons case. Family members of the cast even began getting condolence letters. Whatever was hiding within those woods–and more specifically, in the final frames of the movie–had ratcheted up a sort of hysteria. The Blair Witch was practically true crime in the late 90s, and audiences could not get enough.
Ahead of Blair Witch’s Cannes debut, the cast was forbidden to attend in order to maintain the facade of their disappearance. Interns at Artisan, who would pick up Blair Witch for worldwide distribution, plastered “missing” posters all over the festival to ratchet up interest, and perpetuate a myth that the cast was indeed presumed dead. Even their pages on IMDB, the Internet Movie Database, listed the actors behind the roles as “deceased.” It’s not as if Josh, Michael, or Heather could set the record straight–before the release, they were actually forbidden to say otherwise.
Another first-of-its-kind touch was a website built from the ground up that suggested the filmmakers had actually disappeared. Viral marketing was literally created thanks to this website, and the speculative interest in what the film held within. The materials were not just text, but low-res videos of “evidence,” and alleged news reports. Sanchez developed a mailing list that amassed over 10,000 people and really helped to get the film on potential viewers’ radars who would maybe never have watched under different circumstances.
A faux documentary, entitled Curse of the Blair Witch Project, marked the first major expansion and push that the film itself could be nonfiction. This creative supplement would be one of many in building up a believable horror show. Aiming to “uncover” more of the mysteries, the full-length supplemental movies aired on the Sci Fi Channel, and used “archival footage” and news clippings. As one last big media push, Curse debuted the same week as The Blair Witch Project headed into theaters. Back before any topic was a Google away, it seemed easier to blindly believe that something of this magnitude could be real. If REAL interviews with family members were featured, how could it possibly be a hoax? The filmmakers never directly claimed the movie to be factual, and yet that’s exactly what the marketing materials seemed to present.
Back when the only found footage offering on the market was the underseen now-cult-classic video nasty Cannibal Holocaust, two budding young filmmakers came up with an inspired concept: a first-person horror feature set in the eerie woods of Maryland, baked around the idea of seeing a lone stick figure hanging from a tree. That stick figure has now become an iconic symbol within the world of horror cinema.
Co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, two close friends from the University of Central Florida, could not have realized their two-year passion project would quickly grow to be the stuff of genre legend. A unique filmmaking process was key to its aura and mystique. In 1999, The Blair Witch Project was practically formed from mystery, unlike anything that had come before it, or has come since. The first step was discovering the unknowns who would fill these roles.
Of course, casting unknown actors in key roles is always a gamble, but when a film relies so heavily on improvisational tactics and a shroud of secrecy, they came to be the best fit. Not only that, but the presence of unknowns prevents an instantly recognizable face from pulling you out of the immersion. According to VICE, a casting call for “The Black Hill Project” promised to be shot under “difficult conditions” for an “improvisational feature film.” These conditions would play upon the chemistry between actors–all of whom were expected to fully operate their own cameras, and spend days on end in the woods with dwindling food. Their chemistry bleeds into every frame of the film, only bolstering the credibility of three bickering friends.
Filming with a dialogue-free, 35-page treatment, every single bit of dialogue was improvised. There’s authenticity, and then there’s whatever hellscape the actors had to endure in order to make Blair Witch into something truly revolutionary. The actors were encouraged to interact via planted directing notes left inside of milk crates. GPS system coordination would steer them in the right directions, with the whole affair painstakingly etched out in coordinates ahead of time. Food was rationed until it became scarce, according to 20th-anniversary interviews over at VICE. The actors even had a safe word if one of them went too far: taco.
They were complete unknowns, so their real names were utilized as the names of the characters they portrayed, further bolstering the film’s authenticity. Bronx-born Michael, a SUNY New Paltz graduate, was drawn in by the enticing nature of the filming, which had never been done before. Joshua was just looking for “an adventure,” and came into Blair Witch with a vigor for the craft. Heather was the lone female of the group–originally, Blair Witch was pitched with three males at its center, but Heather stole the show. These days, Heather has quite the complicated relationship with the franchise—in an interview with Indiewire, Heather reveals that she retired from acting and changed her name due to emotional trauma from name recognition. Remember, Heather’s obituary was published at the age of twenty-four. From Heather’s point of view, her “name and face are forever going to be someone else’s intellectual property.” Playing fictionalized versions of themselves probably began to wear off its welcome the more the film’s wildly unexpected popularity began to spread like a wayward witch’s curse.
The world that filmmaking duo Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez created from the ground up made for a lasting universe filled with deep lore and mythology, sprinkled with plenty of supplemental materials for that extra touch. A massive part of how the Blair Witch managed to trick audiences had to do with this extensive, hand-crafted mythos. Sure, there was the fictional legend of Elly Kedward, along with the concept of witchcraft. There was the established website, one which added to the realism of following these three unknowns stumbling around the woods for an hour and a half. But this team took a page from the Star Wars Expanded Universe by enriching their movie with enough supplemental materials to sustain several more. The duo created a bible of Blair Witch mythology that sounded so convincing it could almost be real. Curse of the Blair Witch was only the beginning.
Out of the Cannes Film Festival, the response was intense. The Blair Witch Project became an “event” movie, one which genre fans would happily wait in lines for hours to go see. The general audience became so invested that when the cast was revealed to be alive when doing later press, many felt duped by the “sham.” In the aftermath of the film’s success, a trilogy of computer games that explored concepts introduced, including The Legend of Coffin Rock, emerged alongside The Blair Witch Files, a series of eight young adult novels. Even with the central mystery and conceit of these teens debunked, the curiosities of the crafted lore persisted. A sequel was rushed into production–the complete opposite of the first movie, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 did not even consist of found footage. It did, however, play up the witchy manipulation angle. It’s a perfect example of what NOT to do in a follow-up.
Originally announced as a title called The Woods, 2018’s Blair Witch attempted to drive up the hype by being a surprise sequel directly linked to the original. Though the film ended up doing very little at the box office in spite of its creative marketing experiment, Adam Wingard’s feature notably stayed faithful to the established mythology. Directly recapturing the magic of the original film was just not possible–the perfect storm of audience interest and curiosity of the unknown doesn’t just happen overnight. In the twisted minds of Myrick and Sanchez, the untapped potential of this property as a series knows no bounds. But would newer audiences be as enthralled with the illusion of watching some actual students in sticky situations demystified?
The subject of whether or not The Blair Witch Project was simply a snuff film was a heated debate amongst movie buffs and the general public, with many convinced that what they saw HAD to be real-life found footage discovered posthumously. After all, who would have gone through the trouble of presenting the material as genuine judging by the guerilla-style technique displayed if that wasn’t the case?
Word-of-mouth buzz exploded as it became the must-see movie of the season. The feature broke out into the culture zeitgeist, parodied in everything from Scary Movie to The Blair Thumb to Scooby-Doo. The gutsy horror flick cost just $35,000 to film, and according to Myrick, merely $300k all-in–The Blair Witch Project would go on to gross over $250 million worldwide. To this day, the movie remains one of the most profitable indie productions of all time.
If not for The Blair Witch Project, there would be no Megan is Missing, no Cloverfield, and certainly no Paranormal Activity. The latter two in particular largely relied on viral marketing campaigns to do the heavy lifting for their subversive takes on “found footage.” Blair Witch worked because it had an entire world built behind its eerie spooks. Believability was key–how could you not become invested as Heather delivers her teary-eyed confessionals monologue directly to the camera? The enduring legacy of The Blair Witch Project is not just the reverberation of found footage in the horror sphere, but also the staggering power of one KILLER marketing campaign.
Were you tricked by The Blair Witch Project when the film released in theaters back in 1999? Is it even possible to replicate the kind of movie magic that led audiences to believe what they saw was real? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Be sure to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell to never miss a video… and don’t face the corner!
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