This Day in Pop Culture: The Blair Witch Project
This day in pop culture history, July 14th, 1999, The Blair Witch Project hit theaters. Fueled by intended mis-information at a time when the internet was new. Its success is the perfect intersection of the right place at the right time.
Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez for just $60,000 the film went on to gross 248.6 million dollars at the global box office. In a 2019 New York Times article they discuss just how narrow a window The Blair Witch Project had to be a success.
In the 20 years since the film’s debut, that [media] landscape has shifted profoundly. The arrival of YouTube in 2005, which made video-sharing a global, social and economic enterprise, has deepened that blur [of fact and fiction]. Add to that the rise in reality TV, fake news and phenomena like “deepfakes,” which use real images and voices to completely fabricate videos, and it becomes hard to imagine a hoax-based movie campaign ever again gaining that kind of currency.
“Now it wouldn’t work,” Sánchez said. One could easily look find out on the internet that Heather from “Blair Witch” was an actress named Heather Donahue — who hadn’t disappeared at all.
-Jake Kring-Schreifels from the New York Times
Myrick and Sanchez weren’t the first to use the “found footage” concept to make a film. But maybe they were the first to make it cool. Since then, several films have copied the formula in order to make films that are scary-but for real. A good example are the Paranormal Activity films. In those films they capture creepy happenings on surveillance cameras in the homes of “normal people.” With the absence of recognizable big name Hollywood actors, and lo-fi camera effects the result is pretty convincing. The Blair Witch Project, which is a horror movie has little to show for it. There’s no gore, nor violence, no actual witch even shows up-the scary is found in what’s left to the imagination and in the strength of it’s actors being able to be truly terrified on camera. And it works.
With horror trending upwards up in movies and comics lately, it’s nice to revisit the things scared us back then: mis-information, fake news, rumors, and footage of events we’re later told didn’t really happen. It looks like The Blair Witch Project was more prolific than we ever imagined.