It’s easy enough to throw them in the woods and let the shit hit the fan, but they craft it so that their descent into madness is slow and questionable, the first-person perspective putting us in the front seat and taking us with them. Myrick and Sanchez do well to build the tension. Here, the warnings are delivered to camera and feel real. These kinds of warnings are usually reserved at the start of poor slasher films, where the dire warning from the hillbilly about the cursed woods is met with little faith. The mundanity of the opening few minutes establish the legend of the Blair Witch and the local belief that “these woods are haunted”. The grainy quality, shoddy camera work and ‘real’ interviews at the beginning of the film, coupled with the off-topic filming in their motel room, pitches the film perfectly as a documentary.
This anticipation can only be paid off by a damn good film, and fortunately for us, a damned good film it is. Such clever – and cheap – marketing for a micro-budget film inevitably drummed up an enormous amount of anticipation, leaving audiences salivating at the prospect of watching a film that left you questioning whether you’d watched an ingenious horror film or a twisted snuff film. In an age where Donald Trump’s ‘Fake News’ hysteria didn’t exist, this was the icing on top of one very genius cake. You would have found a web page confirming that three teenagers had gone missing and that only their footage had been recovered. A quick Google! search would have led you to one of the most ingenious pieces of marketing this side of the millennium (yes, even better than those Viagra emails). So, unless you lived in Maryland or had more knowledge of the American landscape than a trucker, you were apt to believe that Burkitsville existed. There existed no real understanding of the internet the lack of web accessibility guidelines ensured that vital information was lost amidst exclamation points and vanity banners – just take a look at Google: The film is a presentation of that footage.īack in 1999, the internet and its web pages were a jumble of Word Art titles, bitty images and Viagra adverts, and as unreliable as its dial-up tone. One year later, their camera and sound equipment were found. Three college filmmaker friends Heather, Michael and Josh hike into the woods outside of Burkitsville, Maryland in 1994 to make a documentary about the infamous local legend, the Blair Witch. The Godfather of the found footage sub-genre, The Blair Witch Project is as much a success for its marketing than it is its filmmaking style indeed, it almost seems it wouldn’t be the same film without the prior knowledge attached to it. But none could have imagined the success or impact of a micro budget mockumentary horror film from completely unknown filmmakers and actors that successfully utilised the internet as the definitive marketing tool. marketing department would utilise for years to come. We’ve talked about The Exorcist, and how its documentary style cinéma vérité shocked audiences, inciting reactions that the Warner Bros. Three film students vanish after travelling into a Maryland forest to film a documentary on the local Blair Witch legend, leaving only their footage behind.
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