![]() Meanwhile, 1994 is the stated year in which "student filmmakers" Heather Donahue, Michael C. BLAIR WITCH PROJECT REAL MOVIEThe movie was shot over eight days, in Germantown, Md., Seneca Creek State Park and the Griggs House, in Patapsco Valley State Park. Over the next several years, they came up with the Blair Witch lore, hired a few unknown actors who could do improv, scraped some money together and production got underway in October of 1997. In and around 1993, they were talking about horror movies-and the recent drought of truly great ones-when they thought about the potentially terrifying consequences of a group stumbling upon a house in the woods and not being able to resist going inside, despite knowing that something appalling was happening. Not to mention, no one was racing to Facebook or Twitter to spoil the fun.ĭirectors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez met as students at the University of Central Florida School of Film. Same with that shaky, hand-held camera technique. That took some getting used to as well, and there were reported occurrences of nausea and vomiting.)īoosted by a rather ingenious marketing campaign that teased the film entirely as the product of tapes discovered in the woods of Burkittsville, Md., after an unknown but presumably horrible fate had befallen three student filmmakers, The Blair Witch Project benefited from the kind of organically grown anticipation that's hard to duplicate these days. (The idea wasn't conjured out of thin air, but it certainly didn't become a full-fledged thing until 1999. Now it's been 22 years since The Blair Witch Project in all its haunting, low-budget glory landed in theaters and launched a new genre of horror movie: found footage. Two years later, their footage scared up almost $249 million. While most subsequent films would not market themselves to be true events, most films now are primarily marketed on the internet, with even major Hollywood features being promoted through viral marketing campaigns to help make themselves stand out from the competition.In 1997, two directors and three unknown actors disappeared into the woods, toting handheld cameras and a concept. The postmodern superhero film Chronicle would employ a similar style, as would the police drama End of Watch and teen comedy Project X. While The Blair Witch Project's impact on horror cinema and the success of Blumhouse alone is significantly influential, the 1999 film's innovative approach would spread beyond the horror genre. BLAIR WITCH PROJECT REAL FULLThe films most evidently inspired by the mockumentary approach were Paranormal Activity and the Spanish horror film REC. Receiving its wide theatrical release in 2009, a full decade after The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity's found footage presentation proved popular with audiences, leading to it becoming a franchise of its own and single-handedly building independent film studio Blumhouse Productions to become one of the leading horror film studios in the world today. RELATED: The Prodigy Trailer Reminds Us That, Yes, Little Kids Are Terrifying While not the first film to employ the found footage style, its critical and commercial success certainly made it the most visible and influential use of it at the time. With the film's marketing purporting the events of the movie to be real, its cast missing (and presumed dead) and the documentary being recovered from subsequent searches for them in the Maryland woods, the marketing campaign and innovative found footage cinematography style worked on early internet audiences, combined with strong word-of-mouth. In 1999, the internet was still gradually being embraced by the general public and The Blair Witch Project was one of the first films to be primarily marketed online. NEXT PAGE: The Blair Witch Defined Viral Marketing Instead, the film earned a spot at 1999's Sundance Film Festival with a well-received midnight screening leading to Artisan Entertainment purchasing its distribution rights for $1.1 million and securing a wide theatrical release for that July. Post-production turned out to be the biggest hurdle for the project, lasting eight months with the filmmakers anticipating their passion project to premiere as a late night cable television movie. Filmed on a production budget of $60,000, principal photography lasted eight days during October 1997, with filming ironically concluding on Halloween. ![]()
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