“In October of 1999, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while making a documentary. A year later, their footage was found.”
If you don’t recognise those lines, you must have been fast asleep in, or born after, the late 90s. The simplest of placards, its eerie starkness a precursor to a game changer: one of the most profitable independent films ever made, arguably one of the greatest ever horror films and one of the most originally inventive success stories in modern cinema. Not bad for a film shot with a $35,000 budget by three people over eight days.
The Blair Witch Project premiered in 1999, and transformed from a scrappy little indie movie to a turn-of-the-century phenomenon. It was the brainchild of directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, who felt the horror scene of the 90s was too glossy and glamorous—generally well-lit and featuring the Buffy cast. The scariest part, they said, was that these films had been made in the first place. Fuelled by a desire to make something truly frightening, they sought to replicate the terrifying pseudo-documentaries of their youth like The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972) and Chariots of the Gods (1970). They landed on the idea of three filmmakers investigating a local legend, disappearing, and their footage being discovered. Initially intended as a full-length faux-doc featuring interviews with paranormal investigators and the filmmakers’ families, the found footage was only meant to make up ten minutes of the finished product, interspersed throughout the feature.
After an intensive audition process focusing on a need for strong improvisational skills, three actors were cast: Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams. Reviewing the footage after a gruelling shoot in the woods, the decision was made to use the actors’ footage as the full movie. Following a rigorous editing process and a series of test screenings, it premiered in Sundance where it spooked a few film journalists, was sold to Artisan Entertainment, and wound up at Cannes before receiving a wider release in theatres. Its escalating success across the summer of ’99 led to packed-out cinemas and a worldwide profit of $248 million.
Citing the ways this movie changed cinema is par for the course in discussing it. Its originality in both filming and marketing paved the way for many practices that followed. By favouring a minimalist style over explicit horror, it suggested to studios that audiences were smarter than they’d ever thought. Slasher films that had dominated the era showed you everything, but The Blair Witch Project’s strength lies in not showing the entity, supernatural or otherwise, that’s stalking the students. Its method gave rise to a new form of horror that felt more authentic and less ‘Hollywood’—effectively inventing the subgenre of ‘found footage’ horror films. A host of copycats followed throughout the 2000s; some stuck to the rough indie concept, like Rec, The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Paranormal Activity, while monster movies like Cloverfield and Day of the Dead sought to condense large-scale blockbusters. It’s easy to scoff at found footage now as overused, but its sudden emergence made it possible for indie horror filmmakers to shoot impactful movies on much smaller budgets.
The innovative viral marketing also deserves a mention. The use of a website to promote the film at a time when the internet was in its infancy was revolutionary, and purely pragmatic. After covering the film, the website of TV show Split Screen blew up with threads about the Blair Witch, predominantly people demanding to know whether it was real or not. Seeing this, the filmmakers built a website, constructing a believable backstory claiming Donahue’s mother had hired them to edit the footage to figure out what happened. Photos of the crime scene, Josh’s car and of Heather’s childhood were added, treating it like a real incident. Nowadays, it’s par for the course—every movie has a website and a full social media presence, but The Blair Witch Project had one of the first online marketing strategies to build a world around its characters. It served to exaggerate the hoax element, exploiting people’s inherent fascination with true crime. “We’re explorers, we love mysteries, and what we created was a great mystery that people felt they could be part of,” Myrick and Sanchez said in 2016. “We gave people enough information to get into it, and they filled in the gaps.”
As the movie’s 25th anniversary arrived this summer, talk of a reboot was teased by Lionsgate but overshadowed by a renewed focus on the ethical implications of how the three actors were treated by the studio. Donahue, Leonard and Williams deserve abundant plaudits for this film being a hit. Not only did they improvise every word so convincingly that droves of cinemagoers believed it was real, they also filmed the movie. As the phenomenon took off in 1999, to preserve the conceit that the footage was real, Artisan told them to go into hiding and pretend to be dead—a thoroughly odd request from any employer. Their iMDB pages were changed to read “Missing: presumed dead.” Donahue had hired a publicist who was prohibited from booking interviews, and Leonard was reprimanded by the studio for accepting a role in another independent film. The concept worked so well that their parents received sympathy cards.
The film was meant to be their big acting break, but in portraying it as real footage, it wasn’t perceived as acting at all. Even now, people regularly construct mythology around the film shoot, insisting the actors believed what was happening. “I was no more afraid of the piles of rocks in Blair Witch than I was really awestruck at being inside a spaceship in Taken,” said Donahue in her autobiography Grow Girl. “We believed it into being. That’s what actors do.” In demanding they pretend to be dead, the studio may have led to the bumpy ride their careers took in the aftermath—the deceased don’t get a lot of acting gigs. People believed they were dead, then once the conceit was revealed, believed they were hacks, and a backlash swiftly followed. The actors tolerated these indignities, expecting their windfall to arrive, but it never did. As the film broke the $100 million barrier at the box office, the studio sent them fruit baskets.
“That was when it became clear that, wow, we were not going to get anything,” said Donahue. “We were being cut out of something that we were intimately involved with creating.”
The Blair Witch Project changed so much about modern cinema, but can it help change the code of conduct too? It’s crucial that there’s a satisfactory outcome here, so that indie filmmakers and actors can have a go at creating their own Blair Witches without being taken advantage of. This movie inadvertently serves as a cautionary tale for how the film industry treats its stars and creatives.
In April this year, the trio released an open letter to Lionsgate requesting meaningful consultation on any future Blair Witch films, as well as retroactive and future residuals. Conversations are ongoing, but it’s disheartening that such an important independent film showed its actors, key players in creating the film and the following phenomenon, such disrespect. We should all root for their success in what follows next. Otherwise, future filmmakers navigating a cut-throat film industry are in for a very frightening walk in the woods.
Words by James Morton
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