At the turn of the millennium, an uncomfortable feeling spread in cinemas around the world.
Many asked themselves: Is this real? Am I watching recordings of the last hours of three real people?
Some were fooled into believing it, including a Norwegian reviewer.
The clever marketing made “The Blair Witch Project” a global phenomenon. But 25 years after its premiere, it is not just the remnants of old vomit in movie theaters that stink.
This is also a story about actors who barely got paid – while losing control over their own identities.
The Hell Week
It’s not meant to give away too much, but some words must be said about the plot of “The Blair Witch Project”:
Three young Americans venture into the woods with video cameras to explore and document the myth of a creature named “The Blair Witch.” They get lost and wander around the forest for days. Increasingly terrified and starving, they experience frightening things: they find mysterious symbolic figures and are kept awake by sounds at night.
We, as viewers, are told that the three never made it out, but that we are watching their film footage, which was found by chance.
The idea was created by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez as early as 1993. They dreamed of making a horror film where a) the viewer’s imagination was more important than blood and gore, and b) the audience didn’t know if what they were seeing was real or not.
They had little else on their resumes than making videos for the restaurant chain Planet Hollywood when they began writing the film’s extremely short script. But they were ambitious and very cheeky.
Even when Myrick and Sánchez tried to secure financing for the film, they wore their poker faces. They insisted that the disappearance was a true story and that the video footage was real. They created fictional newspaper articles and TV segments about the disappearance that they presented to shocked investors.
In 1997, the three inexperienced actors Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard were brought in. They embarked on a shoot that can rightly be described as a hell week.
TURGLEDE: Joshua Leonard (to the left) and Michael Williams leave the car and venture out into the woods in search of the Blair Witch. The atmosphere was about to become significantly worse.
Photo: Getty
The trio were given simple instructions and sent into the forest with a backpack, camping gear, and two handheld cameras. The dialogue was improvised, and they were asked to film as much as possible. They were sent to checkpoints where they found new camera batteries, food, and notes with instructions on what to do.
The directors stayed in the background and followed them via GPS. At night, they kept the actors awake with sounds.
After a week in the woods, the trio was ragged and exhausted from hunger and lack of sleep.
– By the time all the intense stuff happens at the end, they are quite raw, and it shows well, Sánchez has said.
After some months in the editing room, the directors were ready with a film.
Now all that was left was to pique the audience’s curiosity.
The Big Hoax
Have you seen these three people?
SAVNET: As part of the invisible marketing of “The Blair Witch Project,” this missing poster was created.
Photo: Getty Images
To create wonder and anticipation, there was now a very systematic effort to build the myth that what is shown in “The Blair Witch Project” was true.
A full year before the theatrical premiere, the directors enlisted a PR expert to build the myth. He created a website with details about the “disappearances.” There one could see a timeline, police reports, childhood photos of the three, as well as pictures of the recovered video cameras – all of which, of course, were fabrications.
A fake documentary about the disappearance, “Curse of the Blair Witch,” was produced and aired on the Sci-Fi Channel.
LURERI: On this website, evidence was presented that the video footage was real. Blairwitch.com had 160 million page views during August 1999.
Faksimile: BlairWitch.com
FAKE NEWS: To prove that “The Blair Witch Project” was a true film, fictitious evidence was presented, including four dirty videotapes belonging to the three missing persons, which were found in the woods a year after they disappeared.
Photo: Getty
In order to hide any traces that could reveal this was not a pure documentary, it was now crucial to keep control over the actors.
They had the same names in the film as in real life and had to be kept out of the limelight. Otherwise, people would realize that they were alive and well. In all mentions of the film – and on the film website IMDB – they were thus referred to by their full names as “missing” or “presumed dead.”
To maintain the macabre illusion, the three actors were denied participation when the film was screened at film festivals. One of them was also warned against taking other film roles while waiting for the premiere, as it could reveal that he was alive.
Heather Donahue, who was 21 when she took the role, experienced her mother receiving condolence letters from acquaintances and strangers who had read online that she was dead. At a class reunion many years later, some were shocked to learn that she was actually alive.
SKIFTET NAVN: Actor Heather Donahue is alive and well today under the name Rei Hance.
Photo: Getty
How was it possible to get people to believe such a tall tale?
The marketing campaign did not appear as a marketing campaign, which made it effective. Just ask the then-journalist Truls Seines, who covered the film in the Narvik newspaper Fremover.
“Do we really need to see this?” he wondered and expressed a wish to “avoid more of these true, gruesome stories.”
LURT: The journalist from Fremover fell for it and thought that “The Blair Witch Project” was a documentary film.
Faksimile: Fremover
“This is the one hour and twenty minute long documentary, which shows us “live” what happens in the last days of the three students’ lives. No answers are given regarding what really happened to them in the end,” he wrote in the newspaper.
Seines says today that he doesn’t quite remember why he wrote this.
– But I remember the film seemed like a documentary thing when it came. One was a bit uncertain and didn’t quite know what it was about until later.
In any case, the film had its intended effect on him.
– I remember thinking: Is this real? Or is it a recording of something that has gone wrong? It wasn’t like today, where you could Google everything, he says.
The Witch Becomes Big
In the summer of 1999, “The Blair Witch Project” was shown in a few cinemas in the US.
By that time, it had already been screened at some selected festivals and universities and managed to become a talking point. Before screenings, flyers with wanted images of the “missing” were, of course, distributed.
Slowly but surely, the film grew to become a massive talking point that spread from country to country. From a budget of half a million kroner, the film grossed 2.6 billion. For every kroner invested, 4000 came back.
The vast majority of critics were very enthusiastic. “Blair Witch is the scariest movie I have ever seen,” wrote the reviewer in the usually sober Washington Post.
At the same time, the film is divisive: Many are scared, some are bored. On the website IMDB, audiences have given the film an average score of 6.5 out of 10, which is not particularly high. Some discontent also stems from the fact that the film made people directly nauseous. Not from fear. The unstable, handheld cameras made people so car sick that they threw up in the cinema.
One who made it through a screening in Oslo in the autumn of 1999 – and was definitely captivated – was film director Pål Øie.
He is particularly impressed with how the film allows viewers to create and speculate about what is really happening.
– That it’s possible to create so much horror and suspense by not actually showing anything at all!
He later created “Villmark,” often referred to as the best Norwegian horror film of all time. The story from the wilderness was compared to “The Blair Witch Project” when it came out.
One of the teaser posters for “Villmark” shows actor Kristoffer Joner illuminating himself with a flashlight in the night darkness. – In hindsight, we see that it might resemble the Blair Witch poster, and that wasn’t planned, says director Pål Øie.
Øie admits that he was influenced.
– I think “The Blair Witch Project” was inspiring in how it leveraged the audience’s imagination instead of being very graphic. Especially the way it plays on the darkness of the night and that frightening things happen in nature that you don’t have control over. It’s like Hitchcock said: It’s not about the bang itself, but the expectation that it will come.
The success was attempted to be milked with the sequel films “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2” (2000) and “Blair Witch” (2016). Neither of them resonated with either audiences or critics.
In connection with the 25th anniversary, a new version of the original Blair Witch film will also be made.
Is it needed, then?
Series on TikTok?
No, the film still works perfectly, says host Arman Iranpour (28) on the podcast “Filmhelten.”
He has seen his share of classic horror films but considers “The Blair Witch Project” one of the best. Watching it as a 14-year-old felt like “a fever dream,” he says.
– It feels like you are with a group of friends out in the woods experiencing exactly what they are. You get to know them well through the genuine conversations they have, and that contributes to making everything so scary.
He believes there is a lot in this film that young people can relate to.
– Especially the notion of filming what you do with your friends. If the film had been made today, it could just as easily have been launched as a series on TikTok, says Iranpour.
So there’s no reason to remake “The Blair Witch Project,” is the verdict.
The main characters could hardly be more in agreement.
Fruit Basket in Exchange for Identity
When the news of the remake broke, the actors erupted.
In the magazine Variety, they opened up about the traumas they have lived with after creating the mega-success.
They have received praise for their credible performances that give the film a higher scare factor. The trio filmed and recorded sound for almost everything. Yet they were shortchanged after the box office success.
In the interview, it was revealed that they received a token from the production company when the film had grossed $100 million: One fruit basket each.
– It was then clear to us that we weren’t going to get anything. We were excluded from something we were deeply involved in creating, says Donahue, who has changed her name to Rei Hance to distance herself from the film.
I DAG: When “The Blair Witch Project” is set to be remade, the actors fear that their faces and names will again be used in the promotion without them getting paid for it.
Faksimile: Instagram
The actors’ problem was that they were completely unaware when they signed the film contract without the assistance of any union.
They did indeed receive 3 million kroner each in a settlement with the film company. But in comparison, investors who poured in a few dollars have made up to half a billion kroner.
Everyone says they are proud of “The Blair Witch Project,” and that the film is still loved and feared by many. But they offer a clear warning to young newcomers looking to break into the film industry:
– Don’t do what we did!
——-
“The Blair Witch Project” left its mark not only on film history. One May day in 2003, the people of Bergen woke up to the uncomfortable news that a “ritual site” had been discovered by a hiker near Mount Fløyen.
The Bergen newspaper described this as a possible sacrifice site and described the symbolic figures as “cut out of a horror film.” The last part was entirely accurate.
HEKSERINGIFISERT: The desk at Bergensavisen had a good day at work when occult symbols were discovered in the woods near Fløyen.
Faksimile: Bergensavisen
The day after, four high school girls revealed that it was they who were behind the mysterious symbols. The girls had just answered a group assignment in aesthetic subjects by creating a geometric artwork using materials from nature.
Well out in the dark forest, among huge trees, they had noticed that it was utterly impossible not to be inspired by “The Blair Witch Project.”
Written sources: The Independent, Rolling Stone Magazine, USA Today, Variety, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Deadline.
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