A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
When "The Blair Witch Project" hit theaters in 1999, digital marketing was a relatively new concept. So when one of the directors made a website tracing the disappearance of the film's main characters, many fans took the bait.
Even though, according to co-creator Dan Myrick, the website made it pretty clear that the film is fiction:
You could click on the Haxan Films link, which was the production company. You could follow behind the scenes. We were getting ready to shoot in October. So you could pull the curtain back and see what was really going on, or not. And most people just didn't. They saw it at face value and thought that it was real.
Just in time for Halloween, Myrick joined The Frame's John Horn to talk about the movie's unexpected success, and the many imitators that followed.
To hear the full interview, click the play button at the top of the page.
We all went through this [questioning] of, How real was "Blair Witch"? How much of it was contrived? How much of it was acting? How much of it was real emotion? How much direction [and] writing was involved? We did almost too good of a job ... There was a little bit of a fallout from having to remind everybody that this was very much a written and directed and acted feature film. It was just designed to not look that way.
We said, How do we make this look absolutely authentic and absolutely real? So we took the documentary theory and applied it to a narrative format, and we weren't sure if it was going to work or not. But we did everything we could to take this method approach and then construct the movie in the [editing] process, which you normally do with a documentary, and see if it worked.
If you’re going to create a world with a conceit where there’s a camera in the scene, you have to explain why it’s running, right? If you’re seeing some intimate conversation between two people in a room, you’re implying there’s a guy there with a camera rolling on them. So it introduces a whole bunch of character questions as to why that would be happening. You have to have a motivation as to why that camera’s there and why it would be running. And one of our primary character attributes for the Heather Donahue role was that you needed to have someone that was crazy enough to continue rolling when things got really dire towards the end of the film. So we wanted somebody that was kind of this Geraldo Rivera on steroids.