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The Rise And Fall Of The Blair Witch Project
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Mar 24, 2025
When The Blair Witch Project first started marketing the film, it seemed like a real life documentary about a group of campers that came across an ancient witch deep in the woods. The marketing was so successful audiences thought the story and events were factual, creating one of the biggest viral campaigns ever seen.
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Help! Please help us
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This is not the way to get out of here. The Blair Witch Project
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It's easy to forget decades later what a seismic shift this film represented for independent horror
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Beyond being an effective horror thriller, the movie developed a life of its own
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even going so far as to become an urban legend in its own right. So what happened? How did all of that turn into this
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How many Heather Donahue's does it take to screw in the light bulb? How many
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Just one! Just one of them! Released in 1999, the Blair Witch Project popularized the found footage horror film
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using the visual language of a documentary in a way few films had before it
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This deliberately irregular camera work is an incredibly effective artistic choice that leads to iconic imagery
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such as the shot of actress Heather Donoghue holding the camera under her nose
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tears and mucus pouring down her face, whispering into the lens. I'm scared to close my eyes
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The raw production value is part of what made the Blair Witch Project so effective at convincing audiences
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that what they were seeing was actual real footage of a doomed camping trip
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This feeling was even reinforced by the filmmakers, who went out of their way to immerse audiences in the fiction
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with pleas for tips on the missing persons of the film. The film's credits on the earliest version of IMDb were withheld to avoid revealing the people were actors and not actual doomed campers
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It also needs to be acknowledged how much the early days of the internet played a role in the film's marketing
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The Blair Witch Project had an official website that added to the urban legend nature of the movie
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further building the fictional disappearance of the film's central group. The people behind the website went to great lengths to make the disappearances of the film's leads seem like a true unsolved mystery
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On the site you could find diary entries photos of discovered belongings and a timeline of events It was one of the earliest examples of viral marketing Without the aid of modern social media The Blair Witch Project became a phenomenon of mystery and intrigue
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before many people even saw a second of footage. The movie ended up grossing over $200 million on an incredibly small budget of only $60,000
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Many critics, such as Roger Ebert, gave the film stellar reviews. The Blair Witch Project is creative and inventive and original and surprisingly disturbing
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And even after seeing the film, the discussion and debate over the truth behind the movie continued
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So how did things go so poorly for the franchise so quickly
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The hype machine ended up being perhaps the best and worst thing to happen to its sequel
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You're walking into the official Blair store. This is where it all begins
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This is the epicenter of the Blair Witch Hunt website. Book of Shadows, Blair Witch 2, scored a C-plus cinema score after its opening
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It was clear that many felt underwhelmed by the film, and there's no doubt that the legend of the movie had begun to overshadow the actual film itself
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The sequel chose to take radical new directions in terms of the film's structure and presentation
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One of the major departures from the original to the sequel was that Book of Shadows is filmed as a traditional narrative film rather than a found footage film
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Attempts were made to pass the film off as dramatizations of real events that happened
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after the original film's release, including a block of text in the sequel's opening
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But it became obvious immediately that the original Blair Witch Project was a true lightning
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in a bottle moment. The sequel not only had to live up to the impossible to recreate hype of the original
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but it also had to overcome its radical departure in tone and style
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As critic Roger Ebert said, Everything that made The Blair Witch Project an indie masterpiece has been falsified and trashed
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in this spectacularly bad sequel The sequel only ended up grossing million on a million budget Without the hype the mystery and the curiosity that the original managed to stir up on filmgoers
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the sequel never stood a chance. An attempt to make a third Blair Witch film would wallow in
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development hell for a decade and a half. Book of Shadows had killed the once hugely promising
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franchise, Stone Dead. I haven't killed anybody. Ironically, the end of Blair Witch did not mean the end of found footage horror films
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The style would prove itself to be wildly popular, with films like Cloverfield and VHS
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providing an awe-inspiring scale of horror within the intimate confines of found footage
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Or the Paranormal Activity series, which sought to find new unsettling ways to find the mundane
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horrors of its ghosts, including six sequels with a total franchise gross of over $400 million
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one could easily imagine this could have been the same fate of the Blair Witch Project franchise
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had things gone differently. Beyond the filmmaking techniques, these movies also emulated the Blair
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Witch Project in another key way, marketing. Cloverfield famously released only its mysterious
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teasers of a decapitated Statue of Liberty, allowing speculation about just what the movie
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was about for months before its release. Paranormal Activity had a unique rollout, setting up a website
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where people could demand the film be screened in their town before the film received its official
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nationwide release. These marketing techniques showed an understanding of the appeal of the
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Blair Witch Project. The original film became more than just a movie, it became an experience
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The sense of excitement audiences had to unravel the film's secrets was proven to be a vital part
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of its success. With all this excitement over the found footage genre
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a return to the Blair Witch universe seemed inevitable. And what about the legends? Legends
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Yeah, do you believe at all in the stories about the Blair Witch
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In 2016 up and coming indie horror director Adam Wingard new film entitled The Woods premiered at San Diego Comic What the unsuspecting audience at the panel discovered as they watched the film was that The Woods was actually a secret sequel to The Blair Witch Project released under the
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name Blair Witch. The studio even went as far to decorate the San Diego Comic-Con halls with
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massive banners for a film called The Woods, only to quickly switch them out during the film's first
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screening so audience members would see the new Blair Witch poster after the film. All of this was
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clearly an attempt to recreate the original film's viral hype, and it paid off somewhat. The film's
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reviews were on the whole far more positive than Book of Shadows, but this good word of mouth could
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not be converted into box office success. Blair Witch ended up only grossing $45 million. The
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film's grosses were ultimately seen as a disappointment for the studio when compared to
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other low-budget horror films. And once again, the Blair Witch franchise was laid to rest
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All right, that's it. Come on, turn it off, turn it off. Ultimately, the Blair Witch Project could be deemed a victim of its own runaway success
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Few films have captured the attention and imagination of filmgoers since, but the movie was also released at perhaps the last possible time where a film could genuinely
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surprise and, for lack of a better word, deceive filmgoers with the truth of its production
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In today's world of internet film fandom, just about every film production is held under a microscope with set leaks and endless trailer breakdowns
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The contemporary internet sleuths would likely uncover the truth of The Blair Witch Project almost immediately
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The lesson to be learned here is that not everything needs a sequel or a franchise
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An artistic triumph can and should be allowed to exist in finality without trying to reboot or revive it every five to ten years
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The Blair Witch Project is a cautionary tale of what can happen when a film becomes a victim
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of its own success and tries to conjure up a sequel when maybe leaving a franchise at
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one beloved film would have been enough
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