“Candles, pentagrams-that kind of basic satanic stuff.” (Myrick and Sánchez did not respond to interview requests.) “We called it the woods movie, like shorthand,” says Michael Monello, a UCF classmate who, along with a few others, would reunite with Myrick and Sánchez to produce the project. “The idea was somebody doing some kind of filming in the woods, and then coming up upon a really creepy house and going inside it and finding all kinds of satanic, ritualistic stuff,” Sánchez told The Week in 2015. That fear.” Together, they dreamed up a witch named Elly Kedward.
#The actors from the blair witch project 1999 movie
“So we wanted to make a horror movie that kind of tapped into that. “We just liked those old reality-based shows and how they kind of creeped us out as kids,” Myrick told Rolling Stone in 1999. They’d hang out at each other’s apartments and watch documentary-style movies like Ancient Astronauts and The Legend of Boggy Creek. Myrick and Sánchez met at the University of Central Florida’s film school in the ’90s, and bonded over their love of Big Foot and In Search Of…, the late-’70s unsolved mysteries show.
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How did its creators pull off such a monumental viral sensation when the term “viral” was barely mainstream? Like a lot of online phenomena, it was mostly an accident.įrom the very start, The Blair Witch Project was meant to be a contemporary urban legend. Its influence was personal, rooted as much in the strength of its fan base as it was in the mythos of the story. It was a moment when the setting, characters, and story lines of a film could find new life on separate mediums, pushing fans to engage with entertainment on a deeper level. Twenty years later, as streaming companies rush to embrace internet fandom and increasingly rely on digital communities to boost their content, Blair Witch’s rollout is now seen as a crucial lesson in modern movie marketing. “They moved the boundaries of make-believe from the margins of the movie screen out to people’s homes and cable television,” explains Doug Rushkoff, the media theorist who coined the term “viral” in his 1994 book, Media Virus! “The movie no longer started with the lights going down in the movie theater.
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As Adweek noted in 1999, the “little indie that could” left Hollywood “scrambling to figure out if guerrilla marketing on the Web is a blessing or a curse.” Out of nowhere, a troupe of University of Central Florida grads seized the reins of the internet and forged a new path for modern-day moviegoing.
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Promotionally, they extended their storytelling to both web forums and television “documentaries,” upgrading the concept of word of mouth to straight-up virality, and laying the groundwork for future internet folklore. Stylistically, cocreators Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez conjured a new level of verisimilitude by embracing the equipment and amateur camerawork of the masses, spawning (or at least popularizing) the “found footage” horror subgenre. The Blair Witch Project’s principal photography cost a mere $35,000, but it went on to gross about $248.6 million at the box office-an indie film record at the time. That “something” was a cultural phenomenon that fundamentally changed the way we interact with entertainment. I don’t know what it was, but this is going to be something.’”ġ999 Movies Week: A Celebration of the Best Year in Film I remember sending notes to my editor that night, saying: ‘This is going to be something. “You felt like something was going to be out there.
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Magic enough for him to get inside his head. “That first night it was like magic,” he remembers. Hochman left the Egyptian Theater and wandered through the woods to his condo, terrified and wondering whether he’d just watched a snuff film, or an entirely new genre of horror flick. … A year later their footage was found.” What followed was spliced-together bits of shaky Hi8 video and black-and-white 16mm film footage from the wilderness, punctuated by the three students’ increasingly paranoid arguments, desperate screams, and, eventually, their demise. It opened with a prologue that read: “In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. It was a typically chilly night in Park City, Utah, where Hochman was covering the Sundance Film Festival for Entertainment Weekly, and the movie he’d just watched was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. That’s what David Hochman told himself on January 24, 1999, after a midnight showing of a little indie film called The Blair Witch Project.