Michael appeared in an episode of Law & Order and reportedly managed a theater in New York while studying to be a guidance counselor. Heather, after a handful of other projects, retired from acting and published a book. Although it inspired other films such as Creep, the Paranormal Activity franchise, REC, V/H/S, and countless others, it did the best job at convincing people that there was a chance it could be authentic.Īfter The Blair Witch Project, the cast would sometimes attend conventions to meet fans. ![]() Shot in eight days and consisting of twenty hours of footage scaled down to 82 minutes for the finished product, The Blair Witch Project still remains a go-to film for me to this day. It’s something that we can’t see that ultimately haunts us the most. ![]() There is no visible monster and no knife-wielding maniac. The film abruptly ends and we never do see what it was that attacked them, but that was the genius behind this movie. Heather soon reaches the basement and as her camera pans to find Mike facing a corner, something attacks her and her camera also falls to the ground. We then see from Mike’s camera that he is down in the basement when an unseen force strikes him, causing him to drop it. When Mike hears Josh yelling out, he takes off running down to the basement and Heather tries to convince him to stop to no avail. As they make their way upstairs, the walls are covered in bloody child sized handprints. Soon, they stumble upon a dilapidated house and begin to explore it. The first-person point of view makes the viewer experience what the actors are seeing. One night while hearing children laughing along with the cries and tormented screams of their missing friend, both Heather and Mike race blindly through the woods with their cameras rolling. ![]() As they search to find their friend, despair and horror take over as they try to not only find a way out of the woods, but also find their friend, who they fear was taken by the Blair Witch. Then, there is the faint sound of children in the distance while they are attempting to sleep in their tents. It doesn’t take long before the trio finds themselves witnessing some strange occurrences, such as coming across crudely made stick figures hanging from trees and piles of rocks that appear to be unmarked graves. It played on our fears of being lost in the woods and, more broadly, our fears of the unknown. Filmed by the cameras they took with them, there were no special effects, music, or scripts to speak of. The movie shows three college students heading out into the thick forest to investigate the urban legend of the Blair Witch. The film would gross over $250 million and the franchise expanded with novels, video games, two sequels, and even comics. Williams, the cast used their first names in the film. Starring Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Working with a relatively small budget of $60,000.00, the film premiered at the Sundance festival and commercially released on July 14th, 1999. There were realistic missing posters, claims that the teens were either missing or dead, and even a documentary about finding the lost tapes, all of which contributed to the allure of the Blair Witch. ![]() What made it all the more believable was the marketing around the film. The internet was still fairly new and Facebook did not exist, so the premise of three film students getting lost in the woods seemed terrifying. The Blair Witch Project was a film that spawned a genre of its own.īack in 1999, “going viral” was more difficult than it is today. In this screenshot, you can see the store’s posts, brick corner, and house with a white porch across the street.Back before claims of “fake news” was a thing, one little indie project captivated audiences and opened the floodgates to numerous found footage movies over the last two decades. The convenience store at 5550 Mountville Road was, at the time of filming, called Adamstown Village Market. The wooden welcome sign shown in the film has been replaced by a more fashionable blue one.Ī middle-aged man who told the story of a (fictional) series of child murders in the 1940s (played by Jim King) outside a grocery store, was actually filmed at Stups Market in nearby Adamstown. Much of the movie’s first 13 minutes were filmed in and around Burkittsville, a real town in Frederick County.īurkittsville’s sudden notoriety annoyed its inhabitants, and souvenir hunters repeatedly stole the town’s iconic sign. The Blair Witch Project was presented as a real documentary project that went wrong when its three filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland. It made over $248 million worldwide on a $60,000 budget. Written and directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, The Blair Witch Project (1999) was filmed entirely in Maryland and was the first “found footage” horror film.
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