By Erin Free
Now a time capsule piece more famous for the hype and controversy that it generated than for its actual filmic values, 1999’s The Blair Witch Project – co-directed by debutantes, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez – tells of three film students who head into the woods in search of the eponymous horror legend, with the hopes of turning their experiences into a documentary. Per the film’s canny and imaginative marketing campaign, the three disappeared, and all that remained were their tapes. The material on these tapes – the “found footage” – makes up the final film. There’s no adornment, and no post-applied polish. The Blair Witch Project looks exactly like what it’s supposed to be: the scratchily caught video of three terrified film students lost in the woods. In a cunning ploy (and in the early, less savvy days of the internet), the film’s “stars” (unknown actors, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams) were even listed as “missing, presumed dead” in their bios on the now near Biblical website, imdb.com. In some interviews, the producers even claimed that the footage was real, and it certainly looked it. Meanwhile, viral marketing (The Blair Witch Project was one of the first films to effectively use the web as a promotional tool) further pushed the whole is-it-real-or-is-it-fake hoopla that was swirling around the film.
Though a similar marketing ploy had been utilised by Italian director, Ruggero Deodato, way back in 1980 with his gore-filled shocker, Cannibal Holocaust, this duplicitous sell-job saw The Blair Witch Project become nothing short of a phenomenon, with the film eventually making it into The Guinness Book Of World Records for “Top Budget: Box Office Ratio” (for a mainstream feature film). The film cost $22,000 to make, and made back $240.5 million, a ratio of $1 spent for every $10,931 made. “It’s become this monster,” co-director, Daniel Myrick, told FilmInk in 1999. “It’s this financial snowball that is out of our hands. Nobody expected the film to do this.”
The controversy surrounding The Blair Witch Project, however, wasn’t limited to the sneaky nature of its marketing campaign. The film’s singular use of a shaking, untethered camera created a swirling sense of unease, with many audience members experiencing motion sickness and even vomiting as a result, adding to the hype storm bustling around the film. And in Australia, controversy was kicked up due to the film’s typically after-the-fact theatrical release: by the time the film made it to local screens, The Blair Witch Project was already available on DVD in the US, and many intrigued Aussies opted to bypass local cinemas and buy the disc online instead. The Aussie distributors made their displeasure felt, and the controversy around the film is believed to have contributed to the introduction of DVD region coding to prevent such practices from happening again. In short, The Blair Witch Project rocked the pop cultural world, and changed the face of horror filmmaking forever. “There wasn’t anything original coming out,” Eduardo Sanchez told FilmInk in 1999. “We thought that there had to be a way to make films scary again.”