by: Kristen Anderson
In 1999, audiences worldwide were led to believe they were watching a documentary.
Twenty-one years later, we know this documentary was in fact fiction.
But The Blair Witch Project was designed to be realistic, right from the opening text which proclaims, “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared into the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. One year later, their footage was found.”
It was grainy and choppy and sometimes dark, it felt real, like something you or someone you know could have made. No one in it was famous. The last found footage movie had been the 1980’s flick, Cannibal Holocaust, so the format was unfamiliar—far from the theatrical mainstay that Blair Witch turned it into.
At the time, the Blair Witch stood in sharp contrast to movies like The Matrix and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, both of which had only come out months before. Those were fictional movies. This was real...right?
Wrong, as we know now. But the misdirect led to a super interesting movie-going experience, and it started long before anybody took their seats in the theater. Of the time, an A.V. Club commenter says,
“I saw this film while in College in Boston, and the city was covered in missing posters for the kids in the film. We all checked out the website to gather more info and bought the story as a real hook, line, and sinker. The publicity buildup around the film felt believable to me and my friends—mainly because there had been nothing like it—so on opening night, we thought that what we were seeing was a snuff film, but that the movie was being used to try to help locate the kids and solve a mystery. We believed it, totally. We had plans to go out for drinks and party after the movie, but when it was over we walked out stunned, in silence, and in shock—and all went home separately early to process what we’d seen. You could never pull that off again.”
The Blair Witch Project fan Carlos Silva was similarly captivated. He says:
“I watched the TV special "Curse of the Blair Witch" and was so curious and creeped out. People were already talking about a movie that was going to cinema soon, and that it was the actual footage of three missing students. (I live in Portugal, so marketing campaign really reached overseas.)
I watched it alone in the cinema on 31st December 1999, the day it was released in Portugal. It was the most intense and frightening experience I ever had, because I was 100% sure I was watching the last days of those three students. An experience of a lifetime that I could never recreate with any movie.”
The way these viewers and countless others were taken by the realism of the movie’s ad campaign is now the stuff of Hollywood legend. Ahead of the movie’s release, the Blair Witch team launched a viral multimedia campaign before that was even a thing.
They spread word-of-mouth rumors about the “missing” students, the main characters Heather, Mike, and Josh. They planted the story in small newspapers. The crew posted and handed out “missing” flyers. They even aired a convincing Dateline-style television special on the Sci Fi network (now Syfy). And, perhaps most importantly, all of those pointed toward an extremely detailed, authentic-looking website.
Going to BlairWitch.com in 1999 led you down an extensive rabbit hole of information about the missing students and the circumstances of their disappearance with all the trappings of an internet memorial site.
Different navigational tabs invited you to dig into the specific mythology that prompted Heather, Mike, and Josh to go out into those Maryland woods. One tab featured a timeline of events that encapsulated the Blair Witch folklore, which is what enticed the group to make a film about the legend in the first place. You could read about Mike, Josh and Heather as people, look at their prom photos and pictures of happier times in their lives before clicking away to see the rusted film canisters that were said to be all that was left of them. There was even a message board where you could discuss the case with other people. It was extensive, convincing and compelling, even if you weren’t one of the people who thought it was actually a true story.
Luckily, you can still experience this today, with BlairWitch.com having been lovingly restored to its original state in 1999 by the original website producer, Dan Karcher. As the property has gone through different iterations over the years, so has the site, but it was important to Karcher to return it to its classic form for its 20th anniversary, because, as he says, “My primary motivation for maintaining the classic site, beyond the technical needs, is simply my love and passion for this ol' film…[and that] at the end of the day I knew that's what the supporters appreciate the most.”
Of course, mixed in with the overwhelming support came a backlash of sorts, both from those who believed it was real and those who felt hoodwinked. Karcher remembers, “The response to it being "real" didn't always play out well. Blair Witch has always had a strong mixture of reactions, and under the circumstances that has to be expected. But the pattern has always remained the same; they either love(d) it, or they hate(d) it. Very few take or leave it in between. So there's plenty of love shared with us, but there were times when there was dislike or in some cases even hate, and in further cases - threats. In a couple of extreme cases, a few folks thought we actually made a "snuff" film and swore revenge. That's the extreme, of course.”
Just like the film itself, creating the companion website that helped excite and absorb so many people into the Blair Witch story was a true labor of love for Karcher. He says, “There's a sense of sentiment, a sense of affection and sense of importance to Blair Witch, because it involves so much. Not just the story of the film, which of course is a tragedy, but of the folks who together -- and I mean truly together -- created [it]. A simple endeavor, really, but one with unorthodox challenges, and one that brought so many together; from the folks who created it...to those who supported [it].”
As a high school sophomore, I fell into the category of people who knew The Blair Witch Project wasn’t real, but that didn’t dampen my enthusiasm at all. I don’t remember how I found out about the website—it could have been through any number of the ways that the production crew seeded the info and let its roots grow and spread. Even though the site was so detailed, I didn’t have any illusions that it was a documentary, and maybe that reached me by word of mouth, too, or it could have been as simple as the fact that documentaries weren’t usually given wide releases. But I thought it was totally awesome, so I clicked around, reading and looking at everything on every tab and getting more and more psyched about this movie that provided me with an opportunity to get involved in the plot in a way I never had with a movie before.
I went to see it with two of my friends and I know it scared the hell out of us, real or not, and stuck with us. Enough so that when we were on our way home and passed these weird big wooden structures that crossed in the middle, stickman-style, we had fun scream-laughing that the witch had somehow left her mark in the St. Louis suburbs.
That kind of I-know-it’s-not-real-but-I’m-scared-and-this-is-fun feeling is real itself, isn’t it? Maybe the crew of The Blair Witch Project experienced a little of that while filming the story of a witch and a murderer in those dark, cold Maryland woods. And all of us got to see that, experience it, get freaked by it, and love it so much that we’re still talking about it 21 years later. That feels pretty real to me.