The Blair Witch Project is one of the best horror/mysteries of all time, even credited by many for changing the face of terror into something unimaginable. Not only do the terrifying events shown in Eduardo Sánchez, Gregg Hale, and Daniel Myrick’s film have the audience trepid in horror, but even bringing those events to life was a helluva task for the cast and crew.
That being said, the crew behind the lens actually had some of the most fearsome approaches to shooting the movie. This included the filmmakers literally playing the Blair Witch for the three main leads of the film who end up going missing (in the movie) — something that must have been unarguably brutally scary even for the main actors!
Scare Tactics for The Blair Witch Project Were Beyond Brutal
If you think that The Blair Witch Project is actually one of the most horrorsome movies ever created, then you need to know that it was much more brutal for the three main leads of the film, i.e. Heather Donahue (Rei Hance), Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams. Why? Because of the scare tactics the filmmakers used to make the movie.
Turns out, the film was full of improvisation on the turn of the actors. They only had to follow the instructions for the day given through a series of film canisters by the behind-the-lens crew, which they were led to through GPS. But while the actors felt they were all on their own while shooting, they weren’t really, because the filmmaking team was always hidden around them.
As filmmaker Gregg Hale shared during an interview with The Week:
“We were out in the woods, but [the actors] didn’t know it. We were camouflaged, and we built little hiding places where we could be close to them and see them. We were out there, but they really weren’t aware we were out there.”
But what’s surprising is that not only did the filmmakers hang around to make sure the footage was shot accurately through the 16 mm cameras, but they also decided to use this to their advantage by doing everything to make the shoot more scary for the actors. How? By pulling all the strands that the Blair Witch would have done behind their backs!
The Directors Basically “Played the Blair Witch” During Shoot
Since they were cautiously hidden in a way that the actors weren’t really aware we were out there, the filmmakers decided to use this as a golden opportunity to make the film as realistically scary for the actors as possible. That being said, in a way, they pretty much played the Blair Witch for the actors while shooting.
As filmmaker Daniel Myrick shared in an interview with Broadly:
“All the weird kind of noises and stuff is just us running around in the woods. When they wake up and there are rock piles outside their tents, we planted those, obviously. The stick figures—we hung them.”
Continuing, he explained how it quite literally felt like they were leading the actors around on a 24-hour-a-day stage play, saying: “We set up all the set pieces beforehand, and they would just follow our directions.” Myrick then elaborated on the regularly pre-programmed GPS unit and how it “just let them know where they were supposed to go [and] the time they were supposed to be there.”
Yet, the most scary part was when they actually did stuff in real life to shake the actors’ confidence to the core. As the filmmaker revealed:
“We shook their tent, we played sounds of little kids playing outside their tent, we made noises in the middle of the night, we led them to this crazy house at the end—we basically just played the Blair Witch.”
Needless to say, this all means that the end result holding the expressions and reactions seen on the big screens was actually for real, considering how the actors weren’t really acting but going through all of that process in reality! (Except the fact that they didn’t initially know it was all human-induced.) Well, no wonder the movie seems as realistic as ever!
The Blair Witch Project is available on Prime Video.
