![]() Heather (Heather Donahue), Josh (Joshua Leonard), and Mike (Michael Williams) venture into the Black Hills Forest near Burkittsville, Maryland (formally Blair, Maryland) to film a documentary on the Blair Witch for a school project. It only took eight days to shoot and they returned one of the cameras at the end of the shoot to save even more money. Officially, it is one of the most successful independent films of all time. In fact, the mother of Heather Donahue, who played Heather in the film, received a number of sympathy cards from people who thought her daughter actually disappeared in the forest.īlair Witch was a total sleeper hit and earned a total of $250 million world wide on a meagre budget of $60,000. The characters were also all named after the actors because the director wanted to do a similar tactic as was used in Cannibal Holocaust where all of the characters seem to be real people because there are real people out their with those exact names. ![]() Famously, the film was filmed by the actors themselves, which explains why the footage is often incredibly shaky and unfocused at times. For example, in the scene where the tent shakes, the actors had no idea and were generally terrified. Almost all of the events of the film were unknown to the actors beforehand, so there are moments of genuine fear within the film. In order to make the film even more realistic, the actors were given a 35-page outline of the mythology behind the plot, and were made to improvise all of their lines. The actors even believed that the legend was real, despite the movie being fake. Despite the fact that the film ends with credits, many audience members continued to believe that this movie was completely real. The original trailer for the film added to the claim that Blair Witch was created from the film that was found in the forest, which is also reiterated at the very start of the movie. They also created a website (now defunct) that adds details to the fictional legend, as well as the three missing film-makers. They created a fake documentary film about the Blair witch called Curse of the Blair Witch that aired on the SciFi Channel in 1999 prior to the actual film’s release. The film’s marketing strategy was to first create a belief in the Blair witch story in the popular consciousness. The two directors came up with the idea in film school after deciding that they both found paranormal documentary films to often be more scary than the traditional horror film, so they decided to mix the two forms together. Though certainly not the first film, nor even the first horror film, to use the technique, Blair Witch is considered the film to have popularized it. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s 1999 independent horror film The Blair Witch Project is best known for its use of the found-footage film technique.
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