![]() Made at a cost of 30,000, it returned 48 million in its first week of wide. We recommend checking it out indoors-even if you get good Wi-Fi in the haunted woods behind your house. The Blair Witch Project is the most profitable movie in American history. Luckily the archived version is accessible via the Wayback Machine, and looks just like it did 23 years ago. The original is no longer active, which means you can’t log onto the message boards and dissect the movie’s mysteries like it’s 1999. It’s also a goldmine for brave souls craving extra Blair Witch material after seeing that eerie final shot. ![]() Even if you know the three “filmmakers” are actors, the website makes it easy to buy into the story of their disappearance (especially if you’re reading it late at night). The website even featured bonus material that wasn’t used in the film, like interviews with investigators and excerpts from Heather’s diary.Īs is the case with the actual movie, the site’s low-budget feel works in its favor. Browsers could get a taste of the movie by downloading video and audio clips that were purportedly recovered from the woods. The website included flyers showing the missing filmmakers, photos of their abandoned belongings, and a timeline of unusual events from Blair Township history. Sánchez was the only member of the production team with web-building expertise, so he volunteered to bring the mythology of the movie online. Club, was registered when the internet as we know it was still in its infancy. One of the most memorable aspects of the unconventional marketing campaign was the website co-director Eduardo Sánchez built himself.Īccording to The A.V. Williams, and Joshua Leonard (who shared names with their characters) were even listed as deceased on IMDb. To lend legitimacy to the film’s “ found footage” backstory, the filmmakers forbid the three stars from doing press. But when it hit theaters in 1999, an air of mystique still surrounded the production. There’s a common misunderstanding that not a lot went into it, but it took two years of effort to make it look like it was just shot by three students over a long weekend.Most viewers who watch The Blair Witch Project today know the horror movie was made with unknown actors on a shoestring budget. It popularised the found-footage approach, for better or for worse. Not too many movies have had such a cultural influence. All in, it cost about $300,000 – and it made nearly $250m worldwide. The next thing we knew, Artisan had bought the movie for $1m. There was a queue around the block and out into the parking lot for the first Sundance screening. I got a call from a New York police officer who had worked in Maryland for years and wanted to help. We already had some buzz going into the Sundance film festival, partly because of the website we built suggesting our student documentary-makers really had disappeared. It cost about $35,000 (£26,000) to get all the footage shot. 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. Don’t take no for an answer.” Or: “Josh, somewhere along the way today, you’ve had it with this bullshit.” They had the freedom to decide how to play it: we only intervened if we felt they needed to tone things down. These would say things like: “Heather, you’re absolutely sure that to get out of this mess you go south. ![]() Watch a trailer for The Blair Witch Project Using GPS, we directed them to locations marked with flags or milk crates, where they’d leave their footage and pick up food and our directing notes. It wasn’t like a normal film: the actors would work the cameras, filming each other all the time. The shoot took eight days and was a 24/7 operation. There were 10 to 15 of us there for six weeks, sleeping on couches and on the floor. We set up a base at a house in Germantown, Maryland, that Ed shared with his girlfriend. She said: “I probably shouldn’t be released.” We asked actors to pretend to be at a parole hearing and explain why they should be released. The original plan was for it to be three guys, but we had to cast Heather Donahue after what happened during her audition. The treatment covered what happens, but it had no dialogue – we wanted it all improvised. In the late 90s, with digital coming into its own, it was only a matter of time before someone made this kind of first-person movie. The idea was that this film was put together later, using the footage they shot. Ed Sánchez, a friend from university who ended up co-directing, helped me work this into a 35-page treatment about three students who go missing after heading out into the Maryland woods to make a documentary about a legendary witch. For a long time, I had this idea of seeing a stick figure hanging from a tree and it creeped the hell out of me. I grew up around the woods and swamps of Florida.
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