‘BLAIR’ING SUCCESS ‘Witch’ and ‘Paranormal’ still thrilling
groups to infect computers.
The St. Lawrence Health System in upstate New York was reportedly attacked earlier this week.
“We’ve talked about this a lot over the last year and I feel very confident about that. We’ve watched attacks on other cities and learned from them and put additional measures in place,” said de Blasio, though he did not go into detail.
Rich Azzopardi, a senior adviser to Gov. Cuomo, said several state agencies are working with the impacted hospitals.
“[The agencies] will continue to provide support to the St. Lawrence hospital system and our partners in government in response to this cyberattack,” he said.
More tAhan two decades ago, “The Blair Witch Project” rewrote the rules. Eight years later, “Paranormal Activity” ran with them.
Now, two days before Halloween, the Daily News checks in with the brains behind the films that years later still make people think twice before turning out their lights.
“’Blair Witch’ is like the most perfect film, the most blessed film I’ve ever worked on,” Eduardo Sánchez, who wrote, directed, and produced the 1999 found-footage staple with film school buddy Daniel Myrick, told the Daily News from New Orleans on Saturday.
“The fact that nobody got hurt out there and the fact that we didn’t get arrested for being in the woods, the fact that we cast the people we cast, and everything, everything.”
Known as much for earning close to $250 million on a microscopic budget of $60,000 as it is for effectively launching the found footage horror sub-genre, “The Blair Witch Project” may be polarizing but it continues to be honored in nearly every list of must-see scare cinema.
The fictional documentary follows a trio of film students — Heather Donahue, Joshua
Leonard and Michael Williams — who disappear in the backwoods of Maryland, as they try to uncover more about the titular local legend.
“I think our biggest expectation at the time was, you know, like most filmmakers, indie filmmakers, you want to just get into a nice festival,” Myrick, 57, told The News on a Zoom call from Seattle last week. “And maybe you can sell it and make your money back and it’ll be a steppingstone to a bigger project down the road.”
The film’s humble origins and naturalistic final product aren’t all that’s had people talking these past 21 years. The ending, as the “Skyman” writer-director pointed out, “has its own mythology.”
“Ed and I didn’t come up with that ending until about three days before we started shooting,” Myrick recalled, noting they wanted a “big bang at the end” without showing the witch herself “because it just did so much more damage to the psyche” for the audience to envision her themselves.
“(We wanted to walk that line ... where it could be a bunch of creative rednecks [laughs], or it could be supernatural”)
Though Sánchez wishes he’d used the film’s success to“(dive into the film busines”) instead of semi-retiring, he considers the film’s impact a huge honor, but bittersweet.“(Now I know a little bit of how George Romero felt when all these zombie movies started coming out and he had no financial ties to them”) he recalled telling people. “Like ’Paranormal Activity,’ I think that’s a really great example of taking the ’Blair Witch’ formula and making something really cool and unique with it.”
Oren Peli, who wrote, directed, and produced the 2009 “Paranormal Activity,” says he was inspired by films like “The Blair Witch Project” and “Open Water.”
They were “done by nobodies outside the system” and still found distribution and an audience, the Israeli-born director, 50, told The News last month from New Zealand.
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Though the first “Paranormal” raked in just over $193 million, less than “The Blair Witch Project,” the franchise already has a seventh and eighth film lined up, which will both be written by Peli.Peli though pointed to a key difference between the two found-footage juggernauts: their settings.
“Paranormal Activity” centers on Katie and Micah, whose suburban house is tormented by a demon attached to Katie.
“After ‘ Jaws’ came out, people were saying, ‘Oh, I’m never gonna go swim in the ocean anymore,’” said Peli. “After ‘Blair Witch’ came out, people said, ‘I’m never gonna go camping in the woods anymore.’ But what happened in ‘Paranormal Activity’ is in your own house, in your own bedroom, where you’re supposed to be safe. People can’t say, ‘I’m never gonna go to sleep in my bed anymore.’”