- The Blaire Witch Project is an American, independent horror film released in 1999. The fly-on-the-wall film follows three students exploring a woods in Maryland, USA. It was directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Mayrick and the production company involved was Haxan Films, which obviously is an independent company, and it was distributed by Artisan Entertainment. The very low-budget film cost around $25,000 to make and made an astonishing box office return of $250m, making it one of the most successful independent movies of all time.
- The movie follows 3 student investigating the supposed haunting of a woods In Maryland, of a witch previously hung there centuries ago. The woods had previously played host to many gruesome ritualistic and even child murders. They find them selves stranded there when things turn sour and all sorts of activity starts terrorising them.
- The production of the Blair Witch project was extremely low key and it's almost as if they took it as it came. There was a basic outline of a script to start with, however most of the dialogue was to be improvised. Due to the budget being extremely low it was obvious they would not be able to hire any remotely famous actors, or A-Listers, instead they placed an advertisement in Back Stage magazine, to which they had around 2,000 applicants.
- Filming started in October, 1997 and only lasted 8 days, and some of the actors involved in things such as interviews were just townspeople, and were not employed by the producers. During the filming the actors were made aware of their next location for filming using milk crates, found with GPS systems, and to really put the actors in the situation they were lost the directors stole some of their food of a night to scare them and make them grouchy.
- The editing process reduced 19 hours of footage into 90 minutes and took around 8 months.
- Filming started in October, 1997 and only lasted 8 days, and some of the actors involved in things such as interviews were just townspeople, and were not employed by the producers. During the filming the actors were made aware of their next location for filming using milk crates, found with GPS systems, and to really put the actors in the situation they were lost the directors stole some of their food of a night to scare them and make them grouchy.
- The editing process reduced 19 hours of footage into 90 minutes and took around 8 months.
The film was shown at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, and released by Artisan in the July, using a ground-breaking, at the time, technique of distributing it over the internet using Web 2.0, and making it believed that the film was real events, creating a hype for it! After the potential for the movie was seen, there were re-shoots of scenes, different soundtracks and alternate endings to bring it up to the quality of other movies, leaving the eventual budget much higher at around $500,000.
- The movie was widely received by critics as a great film, receiving around 87% positive reviews on Rotten Tomato, and receiving a score of 81/100 on Metacritic, and making it into the top 50 movie endings in the eyes of FilmCritic.com. The film was nominated for multiple low key awards and even came away with 'independent spirit john Cassavettes' best movie award. There were several types of media created after the movie, including several books, a video game and a comic book series released shortly after the launch of the film.
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