AUTOPSY: How Blair Witch Project (1999) went viral
Horror scholars and archival items tell the story of how the found footage film capitalized on the myth of a real Blair Witch and a real set of disappearances.
Editor’s Note: In my new series, AUTOPSY, I dissect the art of filmmaking in the horror genre. First up, we’re cracking open the marketing campaign around The Blair Witch Project.
Earlier this year, I found out about the University Pittsburgh’s Library System Horror Studies Collection through Fangoria Magazine’s announcement that Pitt had acquired materials related to the 1999 found footage film.
As someone who covers viral film culture, a horror ephemera library collection felt like it was right up my alley, as the head witch in charge at SENSUAL TERRORS.
So I hopped on an Amtrak train to Pennsylvania to learn more about the university’s library system, Pittsburgh’s horror legacy and how Blair Witch went viral in the pre-social media age.
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As a kid who camped in the Maryland woods, The Blair Witch Project scared the shit out of me.
The fear was retrospective, because I came to the 1999 film late: For ages, I had seen the tear-filled eyes of one of the protagonists peering out at me from a high wall of the now-defunct E Street Landmark Cinema. Every time I rode the escalator into the bowels of E Street Cinema, I felt a shiver as Heather Donahue’s pained, bright eyes bore into me.
When I finally watched the film itself, alone in my apartment one night, I felt disturbed beyond comprehension. Normally, I feel a safe emotional distance from the blood, gore, demonic possession, and spiritual ruin from the films that make up my Letterboxd diary.
But my apartment was in the heart of Silver Spring — walking distance from the mica-flecked pool of water Francis Preston Blair “discovered” in 1840.
His namesake is on everything: Montgomery Blair High School; The Blairs, my previous apartment building; Blair Plaza, whose only redeeming feature was the now-shuttered Peets Coffee; and of course, The Blair Witch Project.
Even though the legend is confined to the film, the fear inspired by Blair Witch was and is pervasive — and not exclusive to Marylanders.
Real, fake, somewhere in between
Framed as authentic camera footage, the film shows the perspective of three film students — who supposedly disappeared — investigating the legend of the Blair Witch. Each character’s name mirrors that of the actors: Heather Donahue plays Heather Donahue, Michael Williams plays Michael Williams, Joshua Leonard plays Joshua Leonard.
One of the directors said this decision was made to draw realistic performances out of the film’s leads; Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez’s co-director on The Blair Witch Project, told Anthony Kaufman in a 1999 interview, “We wanted to capture those moments of magic that you just can't script."
While Myrick maintained that the actors were perfectly safe, Gregg Hale also told Kaufman:
By applying the same physical and mental stresses to the actors— lack of food, lack of sleep, walking them around, fucking with them at night, we hoped by the time we really needed them to freak out, they would be able to tap into areas of their psyche they normally wouldn't be able to tap into.
This may be perfectly true — a lot of the film was reportedly improvised — but in retrospect, you can’t help but feel like the actors’ names were transposed onto the characters to sell audiences on realism.
Part of the original appeal of the film was that it was marketed as a documentary. The approach was compelling, especially given that Blair Witch is a found footage film.1
Persuasive promotional materials, plus Hi-8 camera footage, plus the question mark of this newfangled thing called the Internet made for an explosive combination.
The power of a webpage
Blair Witch came out at the advent of the digital age. It sparked the kind of Internet wildfire quality that now always shapes film culture and is integral to a film’s marketing, and can even reroute the direction of a horror franchise (see: M3GAN 2.0).
Blair Witch was viral before “viral” was in the common lexicon.
When the film was released, “it was sold as real” with a “thorough” website, Ben Rubin, Horror Studies Collection Coordinator, reiterated to SENSUAL TERRORS.
As reported by the LA Times, blairwitch.com was rife with supposed police reports, newspaper articles and similar evidence to prop up the Blair Witch legend. Even before the film premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January 1999, the block was hot, drawing in some alleged 100,000 pageviews.
“Not everyone had the internet,” Rubin said. “Setting up an entire website to say something was hit differently than it does today.”
When I visited Pittsburgh in late May, the advertising ephemera, horror magazine issues, games and other fan merch were gathered and displayed because they’re “all the things that will help people now to try to understand what it was like when this film came out, where it was the first thing that was had viral internet marketing,” Rubin said.
“I don't know how easy it is to convey that, to folks that grew up in a digital age. The internet is ubiquitous now.”
Fanning the flames of fiction
Along with the website, missing posters were put up around cities, Rubin said, so that prospective viewers could engage with the myth around the movie.
Rubin mentioned that the actors didn’t show up to any film premieres.
Of the press at the time, Rubin said, “People were still trying to figure out if they think this is real — what is going on with it, even though it was obvious that it wasn't real.”
In his 1999 write-up of Blair Witch, Kaufman wrote, “Ever since pieces of the film showed up on the Independent Film Channel's Split Screen TV series last year, heated Internet discussions have broken out about whether the story was truth or fiction.”
Kaufman noted a cognitive dissonance between the arguably deceptive marketing done by Artisan Entertainment, which had acquired the film at Sundance, and Myrick’s admission that Blair Witch was fiction:
What are we going to do? Say, 'Oh, yeah, it's totally real,' and then suffer the backlash? We're definitely telling everyone it's fiction if they ask us, because there's a lot to be said about the [m]ethod approach we took in making it.
The legacy of Blair Witch’s marketing
And even once the documentary myth was debunked, film critics marveled at the fact that the film was made with a minimal budget, Rubin said. In Kaufman’s Village Voice article, he guestimated the budget to be around $40,000; retrospective estimates put the Blair Witch Project budget between $35,000 and $60,000.2
“A lot of the press afterward tried to show us: Look at the impact of this independent film, which has completely rocked the entire film world,” Rubin said.
While filmmakers can’t abuse the Internet in the same way to draw in future viewers, their marketing teams can leverage it.
Just this year, Final Destination: Bloodlines heralded the franchises’ return with a log-filled truck — and what can only be described as an art installation of dead workers putting up a billboard for the film. Last year, facehugger victims were strewn about to promote Alien: Romulus. These are just a couple of examples of the best horror marketing campaigns that have made a lasting impact.3
But more than getting butts in movie seats — and then some — Blair Witch’s marketing very much shaped viewers’ experience of the film.
“I never thought it was real,” Rubin said of his viewing experience. As a Floridian, he mainly wondered about whether the Blair Witch was a known urban legend.
“When this came out, I would go online and try to figure out, ‘Is this like The Jersey Devil or Bigfoot? If I lived in Maryland, would I know what the you know what the Blair Witch is?’” he explained. “What I was curious about was if they were riffing off a known urban legend.”
Because Rubin lived in rural Florida, “the theater was never particularly packed,” he said. He added that he didn’t necessarily have “the raucous theater experience that some people have recounted.”
“It was maybe more full than normal on Friday, but there wasn't some huge ‘to-do’ in that area,” Rubin said. Based on Redditors have recalled about their moviegoing experience, stunned silence was not uncommon after watching Blair Witch in theaters for the first time.
“I did have the raucous theater experience with the Blair Witch Project; I was in Chicago at the time,” said Adam Lowenstein, director of Pitt’s Horror Studies Working Group.
“What I remember most vividly about it — it seems like it's relevant, given the movie's status as one of the most influential horror films of all time — is that in the very same theater, shortly before, I had seen Star Wars, Episode One: The Phantom Menace,” Lowenstein said. “And the feeling in that auditorium when that movie played was deep disappointment.”
“By contrast, the atmosphere in the theater when Blair Witch was playing was electric. People were transfixed. There were people standing in the aisles because all the seats were full,” he continued. “People were willing to stand to see this movie… I saw it in that brief window where people really did consider it to be possibly real.”
Lowenstein didn’t feel that way, but he could tell a lot of his fellow moviegoers next to him were engaging with Blair Witch as if the narrative was real. “A lot of people I talked to who saw it later did not have this experience,” he said. “I feel very lucky that I was able to see it at a time where that atmosphere was so powerful and alive.”
Horror filmmakers and creatives should take note: Even for paranormal non-believers, the zeitgeist around a myth or mystery is enough to enhance your target audience’s experience.
People who saw Blair Witch for the first time in theaters have that experience forever burned in their mind. People who didn’t see Blair Witch in theaters were terrified by the mere possibility that the Blair Witch legend was true, all the same.
Rubin let me know that Blair Witch was not the first found footage film, but definitely notable for its impact on the genre.
The exact numbers on Blair Witch’s budget are disputed (production vs. post-production) but the idea remains: This film was deeply profitable, because the cost of making it was vastly less than what it ultimately grossed — through the power of guerilla marketing, and word of mouth on top of that.
Along with the MEGAN and Smile franchises, Blair Witch continues to be lauded in the horror industry for its effective marketing.