The Blair Witch Project was written, directed and edited by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, two alumni of University of Central Florida, and the idea for the film was first developed while they were in school in 1993. The movie finally entered production in 1997, and was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999. After its appearance at Sundance, the film’s distribution rights were bought by Artisan Entertainment, and it was widely premiered around the country in July of 1999.
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The Blair Witch Project redefined the horror genre in cinema, and inspired a new wave of horror films in the 2000's. Not only is this film a definitive independently made example, but it is also one of the most financially successful independent film of all time. The film was made on a budget of $35,000 without the backing of any studio, and it grossed more than $250 million worldwide 1. It has had several sequels, comic books, and video games made as part of the Blair Witch franchise. The Blair Witch Project has had a lasting [[Legacy]] in the horror film genre, inspiring a revival of the “[[found-footage]]” technique with such movies as Cloverfield, The Ring, and Paranormal Activity (among many others) following its horror formula. The film was inspired by obscure horror documentaries of the early twentieth century, namely Benjamin Christensen's 1922 silent documentary horror film Häxan, and the plethora of paranormal themed [[documentaries]] and TV shows of the 1990’s such as The X-Files and Unsolved Mysteries.
[[Sources]]
Aloi, Peg. “Blair Witch Project - An Interview With the Directors.” Witchvox Article, 11 July 1999, http://www.witchvox.com/va/dt_va.html?a=usma&c=media&id=2416.
Baldwin, Craig. “From Junk to Funk to Punk to Link by Craig Baldwin.” Moving Image Source. Museum of the Moving Image, January 10, 2011. http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/from-junk-to-funk-to-punk-20110110.
Hoad, Phil. “How We Made The Blair Witch Project.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 21 May 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/may/21/how-we-made-the-blair-witch-project.
Martin, Daniel. “Japan's ‘Blair Witch’: Restraint, Maturity, and Generic Canons in the British Critical Reception of ‘Ring.’” Cinema Journal, vol. 48, no. 3, 2009, pp. 35–51. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20484467.
Telotte, J. P. “The Blair Witch Project Project: Film and the Internet.” Film Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3, 2001, pp. 32–39. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2001.54.3.32.
Tenreyro, Tatiana. “The Terrifying True Story of How 'The Blair Witch Project' Was Made.” Vice. Vice, July 16, 2019. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xzy4p/blair-witch-project-oral-history-20th-anniversary.
Weinraub, Bernard. “`BLAIR WITCH' PROCLAIMED FIRST INTERNET MOVIE.” chicagotribune.com. The Chicago Tribune, August 29, 2018. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-08-17-9908170065-story.html.
-, Srini. “An Exclusive Interview With Dan Myrick House of Horrors.” House of Horrors, 24 Sept. 2019, https://www.houseofhorrors.com/an-exclusive-interview-with-dan-myrick.html.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/movies/blair-witch-project-1999.html
[[Home]] <i>The Blair Witch</i> paved the way for marketing on the new medium of the internet. For the film, a website was constructed which laid out the entire mythology of the film, along with more material to help reinforce the sense that the characters in the film were real people and that they really were in trouble, as was asserted by printed posters that had been hung up at film festivals and theaters where the film was shown. A sense that the film was true or real--that three students really were missing in the woods of Maine--was a major driver of hype around The Blair Witch. This is what virality looked like in the early internet days: masses of people emailing each other digital versions of "missing posters" and getting excited about a film that supposedly show the real footage of the missing people.
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<i> Promotional poster depicting the actors as the missing students of the film</i>
The film's unprecedented financial success contributed to other studios mimicking the technique of the website to help promote the film and get an audience into the theater. Of all of the films to follow in its footsteps, only <i>Paranormal Activity</i> has been able to reproduce the alchemical process of found-footage and a sufficient online representation as a way to perpetuate a fake mythology that the <i>The Blair Witch Project</i> had perfected (Hoad).
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<i>still from Paranormal Activity (2014)</i>
The aesthetic legacy that <i>The Blair Witch Project</i> has left can be found in many films coopting the found footage style, many also produced on a very small budget. Films like Cloverfield (2008), Project X (2012), As Above So Below (2014), Phoenix Forgotten (2017), are examples of this aesthetic legacy.
[[Home]] <b> Cultural Context </b>
Bay Area video artists such as Bruce Conner had been experimenting with found footage as early as the 1950's. Bruce Conner's <i>A Movie</i>(1958) utilized found footage from B-movies produced in Hollywood, soft-core porn, and news broadcasts to create a film collage.
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<i>still from Conner's A Movie (1958)</i>
Found-footage techniques allowed the artists working with this material to engage with the original producer's semiotics of the film. Baldwin writes about Bay Area makers working with appriopriated marterial, "those Hollywood studios are a major source of our found footage! Now, a Frisco maker just might see herself as an antagonist to the assembly lines of the Southland" (Baldwin 1). This reuse of old movies and other content can be seen as a palimpsest process, where artists give new meaning to older sensibilities. By reusing material meant for the masses, and through adding voice-over narration on top, artists could turn an industry insider's celluloid into their own personal expression, meant for a whole different audience.
[[Home]] <b> Influences </b>
The 90's saw a plethora of documentary style paranormal shows being aired. Shows like The X-Files, Unsolved Mysteries, and Chariots of the Gods, brought with them a sense the content they were talking about was real. The aesthetic of documentary style filming reinforced this. The cocreator of <i>The Blair Witch Project</i> Dan Myrick remarked, "It was their "reality-based" format that creeped us out as kids. Ed and I wanted to capture that same primal scare within a more contemporary film."(Srini)
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<i>Häxan</i>, a 1922 film by Benjamin Christensen, is the namesake of the company that the co-creators of The Blair Witch started, and serves as an inspiration for the treatment of the antagonist in the film. <i>Haxan</i> breaks down witchcraft as simply an alternative spiritual practice that individuals practice, and that it is not necessarily "evil" or the spirit of hell manifest. Ed Sanchez had stated that he wanted to subtly convey that witches have been mistreated people in history.(Aloi)
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Other influences include Steven Spielberg's 1975 thriller,<i>Jaws</i>, and how the antogonist (the shark) wasn't really shown until the later half of the film as a way to build up suspense fo the audience.
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The 1977 TV series, <i>In Search Of</i>, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, is also listed as an inspiration to the filmmakers of <i>The Blair Witch</i>.
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