- THE ACTORS FROM THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT 1999 MOVIE
- THE ACTORS FROM THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT 1999 PLUS
- THE ACTORS FROM THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT 1999 SERIES
THE ACTORS FROM THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT 1999 PLUS
I guess, in those woods, people did.Left to right: 'The Blair Witch Project' producers Gregg Hale and Michael Monello, plus co-director Eduardo Sánchez join MoPOP's weekly horror film watchalong, 'It's Coming From Inside the House!'ĭuring last Friday's It's Coming From Inside the House! horror film watchalong of The Blair Witch Project (1999), the Museum of Pop Culture was fortunate enough to welcome a few special guests to the weekly virtual event. "I was just learning about horror, and how the trick is to make people feel trapped and alone.
"There's not a day goes by that I don't think about it," says Sanchez, who is helping piece together a real documentary on the film to celebrate the anniversary.
THE ACTORS FROM THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT 1999 MOVIE
"A passing fad."īut the legend of the Blair Witch movie is as resilient as the legend of the Blair Witch. "We thought it was going to be seen as a clever gimmick, but just a gimmick," Sanchez says. 24) that have grossed more than $800 million worldwide. It also became the template for an entire found-footage franchise in Paranormal Activity, which has produced five films (a sixth arrives Oct. But I never expected it would be my calling card." "We just wanted to scare the crap out of people, and it looked like it was happening. "We had made it into Sundance, and you were aware that something was happening," Sanchez says of the film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999. "We were just broke Florida college students trying to catch a break," Sanchez says.Īnd they were unaware just how big that break was. Not that Sanchez and Myrick (who stopped directing films in 2008 and could not be reached for comment), realized how fortuitous their timing was back then.
"This was a phenomenon of both the emerging Internet age (the first movie to benefit from a viral marketing campaign) and the emerging reality-television age." "Timing and new technologies were key factors" to Blair's success, says professor Tom Schatz, chair of the film department at the University of Texas at Austin. The movie would become Hollywood's first viral sensation, though it preceded Facebook by half a decade. Public disconnect turned out to be a non-issue for Blair Witch, which set up a website dedicated to the fake legend: It was so realistic filmmakers fielded dozens of calls from public "tipsters" nationwide. "But when we looked over the footage," Sanchez says, "we decided a documentary about a documentary would take people out of the movie." The 62-page script, which called for chunks of improvised dialogue, changed dramatically over the shoot.The movie initially was to be a faux-documentary about the faux-footage. Additionally, the filmmakers, to frighten the actors, ambushed them with cameras rolling. The actors roughed it: They lived in a tent, and ate the kind of bare-bones food usually brought when camping. The movie would be largely ad-libbed and shot over eight days. He and Myrick began cobbling together a rough screenplay in 1994 about three student filmmakers who wander into the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Md., to investigate the legend of the Blair Witch. "Those grainy pictures of UFOs and Bigfoot? Those were a lot scarier than the movies." Nimoy hosted In Search of., the documentary television show dedicated to mysterious phenomena, from 1977 to 1982. Instead, he says, the directors simply wanted to emulate the true pioneer of found footage, Leonard Nimoy.
THE ACTORS FROM THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT 1999 SERIES
Sanchez, 44, who is directing episodes of the upcoming BBC paranormal series Intruders, says he and Myrick knew their fictional story of three missing student filmmakers, told through grainy footage, was a novel idea, but had no notion it would resonate to the tune of $141 million, the highest-grossing found-footage film of all-time. Hollywood's first "found footage" flick, which turns 15 years old Wednesday, launched a sub-genre in Hollywood horror. The joke, it turns out, was on the movie's skeptics. "I told Dan, 'This is either going to be a great movie, or we're going to be the joke of the year.'"
"We were carrying flashlights, batteries and food to the actors" of the $60,000 movie, Sanchez recalls. Sanchez, a first-time filmmaker, says he had an epiphany. with The Blair Witch Project co-director Dan Myrick. Ed Sanchez remembers the night in 1998 when he walked through desolate Maryland woods at about 3 a.m.