(If they wanted to speak out of character to the crew, they would have to radio through with a code word: "bulldozer"). The cast were instructed to keep the details from their co-stars and to remain in character as much as possible. Instead, they were to left to rely on brief, daily outlines for their character, which Sánchez and Myrick left beneath milk crates at pre-plotted locations throughout the woods. A missing person poster plastered around the premiere. Donahue, Leonard and Williams captured 19 hours of footage over the course of eight days, during which they had barely any face-to-face contact with those behind the scenes. The chosen cast were then armed with cameras, GPS equipment and camping supplies, and dropped into the middle of the woods. Anyone who hesitated was immediately ruled out.ĭonahue’s response terrified the filmmakers, Myrick said: “She was the only person out of the tons of people that I saw over the course of the year, that, when asked ‘Why do you think you should be released on parole,’ she looked at me dead in the eye and said, ‘I don’t think I should be’.” Myrick told Vice that once the hopeful actors signed in, they were presented with a paragraph of direction that read: “You were convicted of murder twelve years ago, and now you’re getting ready to state your case in front of the parole board.” Then, the moment they walked into the audition room, Ed Sánchez asked, “What do you have to say for yourself?” No greeting, no introductions, nothing. Sánchez and Myrick went to now-infamous lengths to achieve authenticity from the trio. Williams and Joshua Leonard, all of whom played fictionalised versions of themselves - real names, and all. Instead, the fear was generated entirely by the reactions of the three stars, Heather Donahue, Michael C. In a strange way, the fact that audiences were never shown the witch seemed to give them more permission to buy into the narrative. The Blair Witch Project brought the mystery mainstream, leaving audiences unnerved and perplexed by the “it’s not real… right?” premise. It was all fabricated a PR masterpiece designed to lay the foundation for the feature film. Residents, the program showed, blamed the mysteries on the ghost of Elly Kedward, a local woman accused of practising witchcraft and sentenced to death by exposure in the 1780s.īut Blair doesn’t exist, nor do the missing people. It featured interviews, news bulletins, media clippings, to tell the story of deaths and disappearances around the town of Blair since the 18th Century. The same year The Blair Witch Project premiered, a program aired on US paid-TV network, The SciFi Channel, called Curse of The Blair Witch.
It’s the legend that masterminds Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick created behind it.
#BLAIR WITCH PROJECT CAST MOVIE#
Now iconic (and heavily parodied) movie-making moments that pioneered the found-footage genre.īut it’s not just the movie itself that meant countless viewers were prepared to believe what they saw. The haunting sounds echoing through the trees. The heavy, tearful breaths of the panicked group. It’s their footage, found a year after they vanish, that we’re told we’re watching. The Blair Witch Project asked us to suspend our disbelief and buy into a supernatural storyline in which a trio of documentary makers ventured into the woods near Burkittsville in the US state of Maryland to investigate a local legend. The ability to separate fact from fiction is quite literally in our pockets now a search, swipe, scroll away.īut 20 years ago, there was a brief cultural moment in which we teetered on the edge of the internet age, a moment in which two filmmakers were able to create a horror film on a $60,000 budget which would leech into the cult movie canon and go on to rake in $250 million.
In 1999, we weren’t quite the cynics we are today.
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