![]() The way they made a low-budget vision into a horrific reality-driven scenario is what makes this film worthwhile. That is why Myrick and Sanchez deserve a round of applause. What was supposed to be a cool project, becomes a living nightmare. Although the video shoots remain, the purpose behind the recording shifts to showing all the twisted sounds that they hear at night and the constant breakdowns that each member experiences. After the group visits Coffin Rock, they go from knowing exactly where they are to getting stuck in the middle of nowhere feeling cold, hungry, and desperate. That is when everything goes in a spiral. With a black-and-white filter and a dramatic opening, the audience will notice a clear difference between what is intended to show up in the filmmakers' documentary and what is just off-screen goofiness.įollowing the conversation with locals over what they've heard about the witch and the haunted forest, Donaghue and her companions head towards the woods, presuming that they will get out on time for their next work shift. Once the ceremonies are over, the first official shoot begins at the cemetery. Even zoom-ins to marshmallow packages and a good luck kiss on the film slate are captured prior to the real deal. When the cameras start rolling, the trio record themselves in a vlog style, packing up their bags and Blair Witch source material to help them navigate the landmarks where the legend took place. Consequently, it is a successful way of luring viewers into believing that what they are about to witness is unquestionably true. A year later their footage was found." Right off the bat, the whole notion of watching people getting lost in the woods and leaving nothing but videos behind is incredibly unsettling. It says: "In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. It was a one-shot deal, a rare combination of uncanny timing and near-perfect execution.SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Tricking the AudienceĪ few seconds into the film, phrases pop up on the black screen, introducing the façade. Nothing like the Blair Witch phenomenon is likely to ever happen again. But it wasn't enough to stop the movie from becoming a box-office juggernaut. Of course, the energy around "The Blair Witch Project" did start to fade, and a vicious backlash started as more people unmasked it. What you saw was what you got and what you saw was that this movie was real. As far as most people were concerned, this was a totally new kind of movie-going experience. Blair Witch was one of the first "found footage" horror movies and audiences didn't quite know how to wrap their minds around it. The Internet was still relatively free of naysayers at the time, so you couldn't instantly go to any number of sites that would immediately debunk the myth. People were intrigued when they found so much fascinating information about this movie online. The timing couldn't have been better: we hadn't yet been bombarded with reality TV and the Internet was still fairly new. There were fake police reports, interviews, "missing" posters - you name it. The massive influence of the film's Internet marketing campaign cannot be underestimated. People thought "The Blair Witch Project" was real because that's what they were told. It became a word-of-mouth sensation, eventually pulling in about $248 million worldwide and becoming one of the most profitable movies ever. The momentum - fueled by a creepy website that perpetuated the idea that this was really a documentary - continued to build until the film opened across the country in October. (The closely guarded true story of the movie was that a pair of young directors had basically dropped three actors into the woods and given them minimal background information and even less direction, forcing them to improvise almost every scene. But then people started to realize that the "film students" were actually in attendance at the festival and they were alive as could be.īuzz about "The Blair Witch Project" spread like wildfire through Sundance, with people flocking to screenings and trying to decipher it. It seemed to have been compiled almost entirely from footage that was found at the scene of their deaths and it was absolutely terrifying. ![]() ![]() It was called "The Blair Witch Project" and it seemed to be a documentary about a trio of film students who were killed in the Maryland woods while making a documentary about a string of killings in those same Maryland woods. In January 1999, a movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival that no one could quite figure out. ![]()
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