I have this weird thing where I can almost always remember the details about where and with whom I saw a particular movie. Even the crappiest movies. It’s like that moment is frozen in time. That’s part of the reason why I love going to the movies! I remember movies much more than shows, probably because it’s something I look forward to and you have to pay attention. One of the movies that I’ll always remember is The Blair Witch Project. That movie scared the sh-t out of me so it was particularly memorable. I knew it wasn’t real but it still got me! I saw it with four other people my age, two of whom have sadly since passed. One couple got dropped off at the theater and so we all squeezed into my Nissan NX two door t-top to drive home (I loved that car!). I was so freaked out and everyone was so crammed I had trouble driving straight.
Blair Witch, which I have not seen since, is celebrating 20 years since it was released in 1999! (To quote a twitter friend what is time? I’ve also seen tweets/memes in which people my age admit that the 90s seem like just a few years ago. They do.) The movie, which was the first “found footage” film, may have been shot over a long uncomfortable week in the woods, but it actually took two years of planning to make. E! has one of their long format articles about it, which I found really interesting. I knew there was a lot of method acting in that the actors were actually camping and eating powerbars, but the filmmakers were hiding from the actors most of the time and the actors had a safe word for when they wanted to break character. It sounds crazy because it was. Also audiences bought into the whole BS backstory, that the actors were lost in the woods and presumed dead. The parents of the actors got condolence calls!
In 1997, two directors and three unknown actors disappeared into the woods, toting handheld cameras and a concept.
Two years later, their footage scared up almost $249 million.
Now it’s been 20 years since The Blair Witch Project in all its haunting, low-budget glory landed in theaters and launched a new genre of horror movie: found footage.
The directors met as film students in Florida
Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez met as students at the University of Central Florida School of Film. In and around 1993, they were talking about horror movies—and the recent drought of truly great ones—when they thought about the potentially terrifying consequences a group stumbling upon a house in the woods and not being able to resist going inside, despite knowing that something appalling was happening.
Over the next several years, they came up with the Blair Witch lore, hired a few unknown actors who could do improv, scraped some money together and production got underway in October of 1997. The movie was shot over eight days, in Germantown, Md., Seneca Creek State Park and the Griggs House, in Patapsco Valley State Park. They wrapped on Halloween.
“There’s a common misunderstanding that not a lot went into it,” Myrick told The Guardian in 2018, “but it took two years of effort to make it look like it was just shot by three students over a long weekend.”
How they filmed
The actors slept in tents and ate less and less food each day, just as they would have if they were on a real camping trip and had gotten lost.
“We didn’t have to skin squirrels or anything,” Donahue told The Week. “It was kind of a daily-use park. We had to stop shooting for families going past on their bikes.”
Leonard quipped to Broadly., “I was probably too stoned to be scared.”
One night after it had rained all day, however, the trio couldn’t get a hold of the directors and wouldn’t sleep in their soaked tents, so they made for the road and knocked on the door of the first house they saw. “They were weirdly nice enough and trusting enough to let us in,” Donahue recalled, “and they gave us hot cocoa. We ended up staying in a hotel that night.”
The actors had a code word—”taco”—they used when they needed to stop being “Heather,” “Josh” and “Mike” for a minute and return to reality. It eventually just made them hungry.
How they started the found footage lore and got backlash for it
The Blair Witch Project website treated the subject matter deadly seriously. It included a timeline of events leading up to Heather, Mike and Josh’s disappearance, as well as local news interviews about the case and fake police reports. As if it were true crime, Blair Witch enthusiasts flocked online to talk about the Witch and what happened to Heather, Josh and Mike. Before the movie had even screened, 10,000 people had subscribed to the mailing list.
“The internet was new!” Williams recalled to The Week. “So if you think back, some of the things you read on the internet, you go, ‘Oh, that must be true. I saw it on the internet.’ Just like when newspapers came out. You believed what you read.”
The movie premiered at a midnight screening during the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 25, 1999. The actors, all of them making their feature-film debuts, were described as “missing, presumed dead” in promotional materials. Once it had acquired the rights to distribute the film after Sundance, Artisan Entertainment even got IMDb to play along. The actors’ parents started receiving condolence calls. A police officer called Myrick to offer his assistance in finding out what really happened to the lost filmmakers. The actors got to witness the movie blow up at Sundance, but they weren’t invited to the screening at the Cannes Film Festival that May.
And even after people were aware that it was just a movie, plenty still thought it was a movie about something that had really happened.
I didn’t see the follow-up to this, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which wasn’t a critical success although it did well at the box office. E! has the details about that if you’re interested. They weren’t able to capture lightning in a bottle again, which isn’t surprising. Also I’ve avoided found footage movies after seeing this! I freaking love horror (I just saw Crawl this weekend and everyone thoroughly enjoyed it) but I’ve never seen Paranormal Activity. I’m not going to give up on horror movies, but those pseudo real movies filmed with a shaky cam are too much. I don’t care if it’s obviously not real, it feels real and that’s what gets you.
Here’s the lead in the movie, Heather Donahue. She went into the cannabis business. I covered that in 2011 when she put this book out. As E! points out, only one of the actors, Joshua Leonard, is still working in the industry.
Embed from Getty Images
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