This seemingly modest idea - Myrick and Sanchez were just hoping a cable network would pick it up - would foreshadow the found-footage, “mockumentary” genre that would take over both movies and television over the coming decades.
#BLAIR WITCH MOVIE MOVIE#
What if a movie was “discovered,” as if it had already happened? What if you had no idea what had happened? What if it were real? Why was it a big deal at the time? The two filmmakers of The Blair Witch Project, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, were friends and classmates at the University of Central Florida when they came to a realization: They were a lot more scared of documentaries than of horror films, which were always wedded to their conventions, giving them an inevitable predictability. And that I, along with millions of others, believed it was real. It remains absolutely remarkable that it happened. It was 22 years ago this week that The Blair Witch Project hit theaters. Suddenly, this cheap, purposefully amateurish movie wasn’t just the biggest movie in the country, but somehow on the cover of Time magazine. The reactions from that early screening, and the way the producers and filmmakers so adroitly manipulated the early days of the internet for promotional purposes, combined to make a masterful case study in how buzz is created. It really felt like the footage had been “discovered.” The Blair Witch Project debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1999, and because it had cast unknowns (who were all playing versions of themselves, with their real names), it could conceivably list, in the credits, that the actors were all “missing” or “deceased.” The movie was made so cheaply, and so long ago (it was filmed over eight days more than a year and a half before it premiered), that it really did feel like it had just appeared out of nowhere. Why would anyone think a horror film was real? Did you think they really found that footage? Didn’t you realize it had the guy from Humpday in it? But you really have to think of the context. I’m sure to you, young, savvy, tragically hip internet savant, this seems ridiculous.
I will admit it right now: For a short, but not non-existent, period of time, I thought The Blair Witch Projectmight be real. Welcome to This Week in Genre History, where Tim Grierson and Will Leitch, the hosts of the Grierson & Leitch podcast, take turns looking back at the world’s greatest, craziest, most infamous genre movies on the week that they were first released.
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