We both wondered, 'Could you do that with a contemporary audience?'ĭan Myrick, writer-director: From there we started thinking about how creepy it would be to come upon this old house in the woods with that style. These kind of movies, to Dan and me, were scarier because they were presented as reality. (Years later, some people have continued to believe the movie was a documentary.) The movie's cultural ubiquity obscured its ingenious production techniques, which influenced a slew of fake found-footage horror movies, like Paranormal Activity, and launched one of the first successful viral marketing campaigns of the Internet age.Įduardo Sanchez, writer-director: We were hanging out one weekend and just decided to start talking about horror films, so we went out and rented a lot of the horror films that had freaked us out as kids, and a lot of the more pseudo-documentary style movies and TV shows, like In Search of…, Chariot of the Gods, Legend of Boggy Creek. Their belief stemmed from a fake website director Eduardo Sanchez had set up prior to the movie's release the campaign transformed the Blair Witch into an urban myth. Many viewers had clamored to theaters to see what they believed was authentic found footage of a witch haunting kids in the woods. Shot on a microscopic budget over the course of eight days, the movie grossed $248 million against a $60,000 budget, making it the fifth highest-earning independent film ever made.

The movie comes 17 years after America became obsessed with The Blair Witch Project in the summer of 1999. Lionsgate reboots the Blair Witch franchise on Friday with the third film in the series.

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