![]() ![]() And I love both of those things, so I thought that was interesting. said "feature film to be shot in a wooded location," I think it said improvisational feature film… Improv and camping required. Williams : I didn't really have any professional experience, other than training at SUNY New Paltz for four years. The Blair Witch Project turns 20 this week, so we spoke to the cast and crew to look back at the making one of the most legendary horror films of all time. The film managed to do so much with so little, and it also introduced one of the first viral marketing campaigns, gaining a following before it even hit theaters. Part of what made The Blair Witch Project so groundbreaking is that you never see the actual Blair Witch, and the filmmakers didn't use special effects to scare audiences instead they had genuine reactions from a cast that didn't know what awaited them in the woods. Williams played fictionalized versions of themselves, heading out to the Maryland woods to film a documentary about the legend of the Blair Witch. In one of the most intense filmmaking experiences imaginable, actors Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Sanchez and Myrick had to find actors who were quick on their feet, because although the duo had written a very detailed outline of the script, the dialogue would be almost entirely improvised. Though Sanchez and Myrick first came up for the concept as film students at the University of Central Florida in 1991, they put their plans into action in 1996, and due to funding issues, they didn't start casting the film until 1997. The movie was the most-talked about horror movie of the season, but it took years to become a reality. Just hours after the midnight screening, the two young directors sold the film to Artisan Entertainment for $1.1 million. In Blair Witch, the shaky POV horror is crystal clear.Made with a budget of only $60,000, the film premiered at Sundance in 1999. Police body cameras exist, as do earpiece cameras that look like the ones from Blair Witch, but they mostly shoot video with less resolution than consumer smartphones, which the characters in the film never whip out to capture any of the spooky happenings anyway. There doesn’t seem to be any real-life equivalent to the cameras, which the film claims shoots HD POV footage. The most fascinating update is the constantly rolling Bluetooth earpiece cameras, which are used as a plot device to explain why the footage even exists in the first place. The movie itself also functions as a way to harken back to the standard-definition, digital footage shot by the characters in The Blair Witch Project. This is explained away by saying that the outdated, standard-definition, tape-based camera is more reliable than memory cards. Now, lead characters Lisa (Callie Hernandez), James (James Allen McCune), Peter (Brandon Scott), and Ashley (Corbin Reid) are armed with cell phones, walkie-talkies, a camera drone, a GPS, Bluetooth earpiece cameras, and a Canon 5D Mark III DSLR with an EF-S 50-200mm lens.Ĭuriously enough, one of the other characters, a suspicious outsider named Lane - a conspiracy theorist and Blair Witch legend fanboy - brings along a Sony DCR-TRV120 Digital Camcorder. ![]() ![]() ![]() Luckily, technology has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few decades, which allowed Blair Witch director Adam Wingard to seamlessly update the original concept. The genre blew up after the original, and now 17 years later, the sequel - shortened to simply, Blair Witch - is dealing with not only the original’s legacy, but nearly two decades’ worth of imitators. Viewers were fooled into thinking the movie was actually assembled from discovered tapes and film canisters only to learn later that it was a hoax. They filmed the entire movie themselves with a 16mm camera and an RCA Hi8 Camcorder. And it was shot in an authentic way: directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez actually had their actors go out into the woods and find their way around using maps. The amateur-style footage was allegedly recovered from documentarians who disappeared in in the Black Hills of Maryland while researching the local legend of the Blair Witch, which gave it an air of authenticity. In 1999, viewers didn’t know what to make of the grainy, black-and-white footage and pixelated camcorder shots. The main reason the classic 1999 movie The Blair Witch Project was so effective is because it looked terrible, even then. ![]()
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