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The Blair Witch Project is a low budget 1999 horror film in which three young film students mysteriously disappear from the face of the earth after being stalked through the woods, lost and kept awake by an unseen antagonist. The film is a mockumentary, purporting to be the film and video footage shot by the vanished students.
This film was a huge success because its makers did heavy marketing via the Internet, spreading rumors and suggesting or allowing people to think that the material they shot was authentic and that the three protagonists really disappeared. This has caused problems for the police department of Burkittsville, Maryland, the setting of the movie. A similar problem occurred after the movie The Amityville Horror was released.
After the movie's success, a good share of merchandise was sold, like computer games and all sorts of memorabilia. Despite this commercial success, subsequent movies have not matched the success or innovation of the original movie, which some say has inspired the creation of a whole new way of filmmaking: the Method Film-making (named after method acting).
The technique used was to give the three actors only a vague idea of what to do—basically "You are three student film makers doing a documentary on the legend of the Blair Witch"—then turn them loose with a professional camera for the documentary and an amateur camera to document the "making of the documentary". The script was almost entirely ad-libbed; the townspeople interviewed were mostly real townspeople acting, and the three actors had only a minimal contact with the real film crew who did not provide any of the footage and played the role of mediators. The real film crew's only task was to prod the actors in the required direction and edit the film using only the footage taken by the actors. The result has the look and feel of an authentic documentary.
The film-makers also created a complex, detailed backstory told through the movie's website and in spin-off books.
The estimated production cost of the film was about $25,000. The movie grossed over $150 million at the box office, making it the most profitable motion picture of all time.
In fact, the method of incorporating the camera and film team into the plot is not totally new. Several predecessors of this technique are the Danish Dogme95 movies, and most notably, the Belgian pseudo-documentary Man Bites Dog.
The Blair Witch Project bears many similarities to The Last Broadcast (1998), written and directed by Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler. Both are mock-documentaries about people who go into the wilderness in search of a mythical figures (in this case, the Jersey Devil in the Pine Barrens) and vanish; however, the endings are quite different. It is unclear whether one project was inspired by the other, or if they were conceived separately in isolation. Cult film buffs also claim a further inspiration for the film is a notorious exploitation picture entitled Cannibal Holocaust, filmed in 1978. This fictional documentary also told the story of a filmmaking crew who journeyed to the jungles of South America in search of a tribe of cannibal natives, only to end up being devoured by the cannibals themselves.
The sequel, rated R, and in response to pressure from Senator Joseph Lieberman over sex and violence in the movies, the National Association of Theatre Owners promoted a policy of strict ID checks, thus eliminating the target audience.
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
The Blair Witch is the character and idea around which the movie is based. In the films, a series of mishaps occur to various groups of young adults, alledgedly prompted by actions from the ghost of said Witch, who allegedly tortured and killed children in the woods of Maryland. Much of the first film portrayed the psychological torture and eventual deaths of three young adults lost in the woods.
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