How Blair Witch changed cinema forever
In 1999, a handmade movie with a budget of basically zero burst onto the world’s stage and turned movies upside down. With its sequel, Blair Witch, set to hit our screens, Maddy Searle looks at the legacy of the ‘scariest film ever made’
NIGHT vision. Found footage. Viral marketing. Hand-held realism. A film shot by its own cast. A movie made on a budget of next to nothing which goes on to be a worldwide hit. When it comes to cinema – and particularly horror movies – those tricks are everywhere today, right?
Well, those techniques wouldn’t exist at all if it hadn’t been for a low-low budget movie that is nearly 20 years old, but changed the nature of cinema forever: The Blair Witch Project.
First released in 1999, its sequel – Blair Witch – is about to hit screens just before Hallowe’en, picking up where the original ended. The anticipation among movie fans is huge – thanks in no small part to memories of just how influential the first film turned out to be.
In 1999, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s independent horror flick was released amid a storm of hype. The movie was one of the first to exploit online marketing – and it did so ruthlessly.
Neil Hepburn from the Cameo cinema in Edinburgh calls the campaign “ingeniously simple”. In the late 90s, the power of the internet as a tool for advertising was still in its infancy. Chris Nials, founder of the London Horror Society – the UK’s biggest club for horror fans – says: “Part of the reasons for The Blair Witch Project’s success was the fact that it was released at an absolutely perfect time – before social media was commonplace.”
The movie’s website – which still exists – was set up featuring true crime style reports about the missing cast and crew.
Ian Rattray, co-director of the Horror Channel’s FrightFest, says of the film: “No one had done anything like this before... It was spellbinding.” Both the online marketing and opening titles claimed that three student filmmakers had disappeared in the Maryland woods, and that their footage had been found one year later.
Chris Nials, of the London Horror Society, says: “The ‘true story’ element of the frankly brilliant marketing campaign spread like wildfire, as folk didn’t really have the ability to verify the rumours. All people heard was how American audiences were fleeing the cinema in terror at its apparent ‘realness’, which only built up the film’s notoriety.”
The website builds on the mythology of the film and provides an entirely fictitious timeline of horror legends from Maryland. The “Aftermath” section of the site is full of phony interviews with private investigators, police officers and academics, all adding a sense of legitimacy.
Neil Hepburn from the Edinburgh Cameo recalls some more strategies used to market the film: “IMDB listed the cast as ‘missing, presumed dead’, and the filmmakers distributed flyers at film festivals, asking for information about the missing cast.”
The film easily crossed over from horror to mainstream – with run of the mill film-goers stunned (quite literally) by the movie’s realism, made all the more unsettling by the use of hand-held cameras.
The film consists solely of footage shot by the cast on handheld cameras. When supernatural forces start to stalk the moviemakers, wildly jolting camera shots immerse the viewer in the action as if they were in the film.
The fact that this film had a very low budget, and was independently produced, was also remarkable for the time. People are still unsure about exactly how low the budget was, with estimates ranging from $20,000 to $75,000 – in Hollywood terms a budget of zero. Despite its frugal approach to funding, the movie grossed an astonishing $248 million worldwide, making it financially one of the most successful independent films of all time. Ian Rattray of FrightFest points out that now “small, no-budget films are used as a way into the film industry. The genre of horror is really the last genre of film where you can [do this]”.
The Blair Witch Project spawned a near uncountable galaxy of imita-
tors, trying to replicate its success by copying the film’s style, content, and marketing strategy.
THE Paranormal Activity movie franchise – worth a cool £1.5 billion – would quite simply never have been conceived had it not been for The Blair Witch Project. Chris Nials comments: “The Blair Witch Project was responsible for bringing the ‘found footage’ horror genre to the mass market, despite not actually being the first film to be shot in this style. That honour goes to 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust.”
Fright Fest’s Ian Rattray says: “[The Blair Witch Project] inspired a whole generation of found footage films which came along in its wake.” Rattray points to JJ Abrams’ “big-budget Cloverfield”, about New York residents fleeing a colossal monster in Manhattan, which also makes use of found footage, entirely shot on a home camcorder by the cast. Importantly, the films influenced by The Blair Witch Project are not confined to the horror genre, especially when it comes to advertising. The campaign for The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s Batman movie, began with a faux political campaign site for the character Harvey Dent. Prometheus also stole The Blair Witch Project’s online strategy. The Alien prequel’s marketing strategy involved a TED talk from the future, and a fake advert for an android, David 8, portrayed by Michael Fassbender.
Without doubt then The Blair Witch Project changed movies forever. With its sequel set to hit screens within the month, who knows what else will change in the weeks, months and years to come.