![]() The Blair Witch Project turns 20 this week, so we spoke to the cast and crew to look back at the making one of the most legendary horror films of all time. The film managed to do so much with so little, and it also introduced one of the first viral marketing campaigns, gaining a following before it even hit theaters. Part of what made The Blair Witch Project so groundbreaking is that you never see the actual Blair Witch, and the filmmakers didn't use special effects to scare audiences instead they had genuine reactions from a cast that didn't know what awaited them in the woods. Williams played fictionalized versions of themselves, heading out to the Maryland woods to film a documentary about the legend of the Blair Witch. In one of the most intense filmmaking experiences imaginable, actors Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Sanchez and Myrick had to find actors who were quick on their feet, because although the duo had written a very detailed outline of the script, the dialogue would be almost entirely improvised. Though Sanchez and Myrick first came up for the concept as film students at the University of Central Florida in 1991, they put their plans into action in 1996, and due to funding issues, they didn't start casting the film until 1997. The movie was the most-talked about horror movie of the season, but it took years to become a reality. Just hours after the midnight screening, the two young directors sold the film to Artisan Entertainment for $1.1 million. Here is a look at the legacy of Blair Witch Project and the evolution of the cinematic style it perpetuated.Made with a budget of only $60,000, the film premiered at Sundance in 1999. Before Tangerine was being shot on an iPhone, Blair Witch Project was being recorded with cameras anyone could buy at a RadioShack. Over the past 17 years, dozens of movies have come out that have followed in the original film’s footsteps, with some managing to refine the found-footage form and create new takes on a heavily used, and sometimes abused, form of filmmaking. ![]() Now it’s 2016, and we have the direct sequel to Blair Witch Project, just called The Blair Witch. ![]() ![]() Then Blair Witch Project happened and found-footage horror exploded, utilizing newly accessible compact-video technology for the first time. The ‘90s produced plenty of great horror, but it didn’t have a clear through-line. The late 1960s through the 1970s saw boundary-pushing exploitation cinema like The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) emerge, and the 1980s were defined by the slasher. In the post–WWII era there were creature features that played to America’s fear of the Other, like The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) and Them! (1954). The 1990s lacked the kind of distinct cinematic DNA that was clearly traceable in previous decades. “Like that youthfully impetuous near-hoax, Myrick and Sanchez’s movie is a work that plays - with form, technical possibilities, audience expectations and the idea of a show as a magic trick.”Īnd as with any good cinematic magic trick, it spawned a generation of scary movies employing the same sleight of hand. ![]() Rose concluded his review by comparing the movie to Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast that fooled America into thinking it was actually under siege by aliens. There was a vaguely similar approach used in 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust, as well as in Man Bites Dog and Ghostwatch from 1992, but the handicam aesthetic pioneered by Blair Witch Project filmmakers Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick was a first of its kind. In a genre that sustains itself by recycling tropes and stereotypes, Blair Witch Project took viewers somewhere they had never been, through its use of found footage. Whether you agree that Blair Witch Project is scarier than Massacre is subjective, but the little indie’s place in film history is not - because just like those other horror classics, when Blair Witch Project came out, no one had ever seen anything like it before. Just flat out the scariest.” He said it surpassed even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho, Carrie, and Jaws. Not the most haunting, most disturbing, most horrific, most violent, most beautiful, most dreamlike or most vile. Not the goriest, the grossest, the weirdest, the eeriest, the sickest, the creepiest or the slimiest. In 1999, Lloyd Rose of the Washington Post opened his review of The Blair Witch Project by saying, “ The Blair Witch Project is the scariest movie I’ve ever seen. Photo: Twentieth Century Fox, Castelao Producciones, StudioCanal, Paramount Pictures ![]()
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