![]() With the crew, the actors set out to Maryland for the eight-day production, first in the real town of Burkittsville and then into state parks for a shoot that resembled a creepy scavenger hunt. Williams won the parts, and their characters used their real names. Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. I think I was in that state that a lot of young people in New York are, where I thought, Maybe I'll go be a photographer, or a documentary filmmaker, or a spoken word poet, or an actor, and I just kind of followed whatever was deemed cool at the time. ![]() Joshua Leonard, actor: I wound up getting Blair Witch because I had some acting experience and because I knew how to run a camera, which is what I was doing freelance a lot of the time at that point. Why should we let you out?" And I looked at them and said, "I don't think you should." And I think I was the only woman who actually said that, and so I got the role. There were a lot of actors that came in and just didn't understand.ĭonahue: Dan, Ed, and Greg set up improvisation scenarios for us, so when I went to audition, they said to me, "You have served half of your sentence for killing your baby. We told people during the audition, "As soon as you come into the room, the audition starts." That worked for a lot of people, and it didn't work for others. Sanchez: The would come into the room and we would immediately start grilling them with certain questions. She was a very driven woman who didn't wear mascara and was on camera in 1999. I was doing a lot of improv, but in a very different direction, so I was very excited when I saw The Blair Witch. Heather Donahue, actress: I was the founding member of an improv company called Red Shag, and I was in this feminist off-off Broadway fringe movement theater company called Collision Theory, where we did documentary plays. Dan and were based in Orlando, and we were like, "It can't be a Florida legend." Sanchez: We always thought it would be based in Maryland. Civil War folklore, Native American folklore-a blend of stuff from that area of the country to flesh out this whole kind of universe we were created. The Devil's Triangle was a really good reference, a mysterious place where people reportedly disappeared, lots of conspiracy theories surrounding it but no one has any real proof one way or the other. Myrick: We used American contemporary folklore as a reference point. We just made it believable enough that we thought that people could believe it. We didn't want people to go in to disprove it. We wanted people to say, "Yeah, that sounds like that could be real, something happened." We didn't want anything too outrageous we didn't want to draw too much attention to the mythology. ![]() Sanchez: All the ideas we came up with for the mythology-we just wanted them to be very rooted in reality. Originally it was a large group of explorers on an expedition in the woods. Over the course of the next year, we came up with a premise as to why you'd be seeing that. We just thought that would be sort of primal and scary. You're unable to pull away, you're just forced to watch as you pull up to this creepy house at night, and you're forced to walk in-there's no turning away. We both wondered, "Could you do that with a contemporary audience?"ĭan Myrick, writer-director: From there we started thinking about how creepy it would be to come upon this old house in the woods with that style. These kind of movies, to Dan and me, were scarier because they were presented as reality. (Years later, some people have continued to believe the movie was a documentary.) The movie's cultural ubiquity obscured its ingenious production techniques, which influenced a slew of fake found-footage horror movies, like Paranormal Activity, and launched one of the first successful viral marketing campaigns of the Internet age.Įduardo Sanchez, writer-director: We were hanging out one weekend and just decided to start talking about horror films, so we went out and rented a lot of the horror films that had freaked us out as kids, and a lot of the more pseudo-documentary style movies and TV shows, like In Search of…, Chariot of the Gods, Legend of Boggy Creek. Their belief stemmed from a fake website director Eduardo Sanchez had set up prior to the movie's release the campaign transformed the Blair Witch into an urban myth. Many viewers had clamored to theaters to see what they believed was authentic found footage of a witch haunting kids in the woods. Shot on a microscopic budget over the course of eight days, the movie grossed $248 million against a $60,000 budget, making it the fifth highest-earning independent film ever made. ![]() The movie comes 17 years after America became obsessed with The Blair Witch Project in the summer of 1999. Lionsgate reboots the Blair Witch franchise on Friday with the third film in the series.
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