Horror cinema is one that has changed radically over the years and across different places. A slasher is not the same as gothic horror, gore is not the same as expressionist cinema, and Japanese cinema is not the same as German or American cinema. Fear can be a universal emotion, but its expression has a time and a place. That is why horror is such a fertile genre that, no matter how much it may displease some people, it never runs out or stops providing new ways to surprise us. Sometimes, even pretending its own reality.
Because in 1999 it first arrived at festivals and then in theaters a movie whose legend spread like wildfire. It seemed so real that many people dedicated themselves to spreading the idea that, in fact, it was. And it had to be clarified that no: it was all a very well-crafted artifice. What is the name of that movie? The Blair Witch Project.
A movie inspired by documentaries about paranormal phenomena
The production of the film begins in 1993 when two film students from the University of Central Florida, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, realize one thing: documentaries about paranormal phenomena inspire them much more fear than any horror movie they have seen. Thus, along with Gregg Hale, Robin Cowie, and Michael Monello, they decide to start Haxan Films, their own production company, to make what will be their first film: a combination of a horror movie with the aesthetics and form of a documentary about paranormal phenomena.
With a script of just 35 pages, Myrick and Sánchez already had the foundations for their film. They wanted all the dialogue to be improvised to give it the greatest possible verisimilitude and, also for that purpose, they wanted the actors to be non-professionals, although they should have good improvisational skills. To achieve this, they interviewed around 2,000 actors under the premise that it would be a completely improvised film in a wooded location. Something that sounds sinister and is not entirely false, given the final result.
To make the movie, the inspiration came from many places. In addition to documentaries about paranormal phenomena, such as The Legend of Boggy Creek and Memories of the Future and Return to the Stars, popular movies like The Shining, Alien, The Curse, or Jaws served as inspiration. But also the documentary series In Search of…, about real cases of disappearance.
Now, all of this would be of little use if the movie looked like any other horror film. And that is what they managed to avoid during the shooting. To begin with, they shot everything on a low-quality Hi8 camera, which gave it the appearance of being a home recording rather than a professional one. The actors improvised all the dialogues. The townspeople interviewed during the footage are not actors, but people who genuinely do not know what they are talking about. And the cameraman had never filmed anything before, having to learn how to use the camera in a quick two-day course.
If you want it to look real, make it real
If we add to that the fact that if the actors seem lost it’s because they are, as they were given instructions on where to go at every moment through hidden messages in 35mm film reels, and if they seem hungry and sleepy it’s because, well, the director didn’t let them sleep or eat enough, there lies the verisimilitude of the film. Something that, along with the fact of obtaining real human teeth from a dentist for an emblematic scene and the actors using their real names, led to everything that happened afterward.
Although they shot over 20 hours of footage, what remained in the end was 81 minutes of film. A standard duration for a documentary, both in what was filmed and what was edited. They presented the final version at Sundance. Myrick and Sánchez hoped to secure a broadcasting contract for television and nothing more, but they did not expect what happened next.
The movie swept the Cannes festival and secured worldwide theatrical distribution. This led to them launching a very aggressive marketing campaign claiming that everything that happened in the movie was true. The movie’s website, the trailers, and even Myrick and Sánchez claimed that everything was real. They even released posters of the main actors as if they had disappeared, to enhance the realism.
And it worked. For months, there was an aura of a cursed movie and that, in fact, the movie was based on real events. This led to the movie being released in 27 theaters in the US, which earned it 1.5 million dollars, doubling its budget, and expanding to a national release with 1,101 theaters joining the party. Shortly after, it would reach the whole world and the movie would manage to amass the staggering figure of 248.6 million dollars, just at the box office and not counting television rights and home format, for a movie that cost between 200,000 and 750,000 dollars.
And the critics? The critics loved it. The critics received it as a breath of fresh air in the horror genre, considering it tremendously imaginative and effective. The audience, on the other hand, was divided: those who liked it loved it, while those who didn’t hated it. Leaving little room for those who were not greatly inspired by it.
Even if nothing else, it has inspired many people. The number of movies inspired by found footage, the name of the genre created by The Blair Witch Project, has continued to grow over the years. Movies like Cloverfield, REC, Paranormal Activity, Project X, or Trollhunter have consistently stormed the box office. And The Blair Witch Project itself has had adaptations into a novel, comic, and video game, although all of them with uneven results.
Now the Blair Witch Project lands on Netflix fully aware that yes, it is all fiction, but it does not lose any of its effectiveness. Now, remember: it is a very divisive movie. You can love it, you can hate it, but it’s hard to be indifferent to it. Although, thinking about it, isn’t that an excellent reason to watch a movie?
