It also allowed for an extremely low budget. That convergence primed viewers for a low-fi aesthetic that, in the right hands and with the right idea, could lead to something novel. “There was something in the air in 1999 that made us acutely aware that technology could be linked to some kind of vague, chaotic unknown, and ‘Blair Witch’ tapped into this at exactly the right moment.” “In many ways mainstream moviegoing audiences simply forgot horror could be scary in this way,” said Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, author of the book “Found Footage Horror,” in an email.
“Blair Witch” could also be just plain scary - in a way that tapped perfectly into the trends and anxieties of the moment. And it was a ubiquitous part of pop culture, spawning myriad imitators and spoofs, in turns inspired by and mocking its shaky cinematography and selfie-style confessionals. It exposed new possibilities for marketing in the internet age. Its amateur aesthetic prompted a generation of filmmakers to pick up a camera, however low-tech. Produced for $60,000, the film went on to make $248.6 million at the global box office, an indie record at the time.
BLAIR WITCH PROJECT MOVIE MOVIE
Today, “Blair Witch,” released 20 years ago this week (and streaming now on Hulu), remains an inflection point for the movie industry. “The prime directive we had was that the film had to look completely real,” said Eduardo Sánchez, who conceived and directed the entire thing with Daniel Myrick, from the manufactured legend to the film itself. But a lot of viewers didn’t know that going in. What eventually emerged - a feature-length film made of spliced together scenes of shaky home video footage - made the demise of its three characters seem all the more authentic and terrifying. The hype, intrigue and skepticism surrounding the account, fueled by the internet’s advent, grew through the movie’s premiere, in July 1999. The online message boards began to buzz, with questions about the story’s veracity. Their footage was recovered a year later, providing evidence to support a disturbing legend. More than a year before “The Blair Witch Project” hit theaters and became a cultural phenomenon, its central mystery had already gone viral.Īccording to the movie’s fledgling promotional website, which presented itself as a real investigative project, three film students - Heather, Mike and Josh - had ventured into the Maryland woods in 1994 to shoot a documentary and then disappeared.
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