#Was the blair witch project real movie#
#Was the blair witch project real free#

That meant, by the time The Blair Witch Project opened in theatres to a wide audience, everyone was talking about it. If I could have immediately found proof that the film was fake, it would have eased my mind greatly but, in the Spring between the film’s premiere and its theatrical release, those articles were not easy to come by. And there was plenty, thanks to Artisan’s brilliant, landmark, online marketing campaign. In the weeks that followed, I poked around the Blair Witch website to read what I could about it. For an instant, I imagined a supernatural being actually forced Michael to stand in a corner while it attacked Heather, who then dropped the camera before the credits rolled. Then the thought crept into my head: “ He was standing in the corner.” Just picturing the film’s final image freaked me out. It was late, dark, and only the street lights illuminated the tiny room. When I got back to my dorm after the movie, my roommate wasn’t there. Just look what she did to these three kids. But the Blair Witch? Yeah, she could be real. Watching the film for the first time, it Jason movies you’ve seen, it’s not hard to realise those characters are fake. The footage is shaky (so shaky, in fact, people regularly got motion sickness in screenings), the performances are brash, the reactions authentic, and it truly does feel like a horrifying home video that could have been found laying under a pile of leaves. Nothing about it feels fake because it isn’t fake.

The result is about as realistic and raw a motion picture as humanly possible.

#Was the blair witch project real movie#

As directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez (whose names aren’t blasted all over the film like a normal movie, only adding to the ruse), The Blair Witch Project starred three unknown actors who shot the movie themselves and largely improvised everything. Once the movie started, the filmmaking didn’t provide a definitive answer. We didn’t think so, but we couldn’t be 100 per cent sure.

My friends and I RSVP’d and lined up early, eager to see what all the fuss was about, all the time debating if this could actually be real or not.

#Was the blair witch project real free#

Which I say from experience because, when I saw the film sometime around April of 1999, I had no idea what I was walking into.Īfter months of reading about Blair Witch on movie websites, finally, a free screening came to New York City, where I was going to college. But this was 1999 and our collective bullshit meters weren’t quite as advanced. Of course, no one would, or could, release a snuff film in theatres. These days, we would immediately see through this marketing ploy.

The result was that some readers believed the events of the film were real and that they could watch actual footage of three teens who went missing in the Maryland woods. On the site were articles and photos that added context to the movie, spawning alternate histories, theories, and more. They launched a website on the events of the film, but without acknowledging it was fiction. But after buying the rights at Sundance, Artisan had tried to delay that realisation for as long as possible. The whole concept of “found footage,” while still extremely new, had been debunked thanks to the actors appearing on magazine covers and late-night talk shows. Artisan ultimately paid over $US1 ($1) million for the film and, in the months that followed, changed the way films would be marketed forever by, basically, lying to the public.īy the time most people saw The Blair Witch Project in theatres that summer, everyone knew it was fake. Immediately after its first midnight screening, distributors stayed up all night bidding for the rights to the film. The Blair Witch Project premiered in January 1999 the Sundance Film Festival.