.
This movie was written and directed by two men, Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who live in Florida. Both the movie and the "legend" behind the movie, as described on their web site, are entirely fictitious. The film consists of ostensible "found footage" shot by three fictional film students who decided to shoot a documentary about a legendary witch who had been rumored about among the local folk for 200 years. The students headed into the woods of north-central Maryland and, as the story goes, never returned. According to the script, the Maryland State Police looked in vain for their bodies, finally giving up and calling off the search. Almost a year later, a few items that the students had taken with them, including a diary and a few reels of videotape, were found. The Blair Witch Project is supposedly pieced together from those recovered videotapes. The movie we see is presented as a rough pseudo-documentary, in the style of the "Unexplained Mysteries" type of television shows that concern themselves with Bigfoot, UFO's, and the paranormal often shown on cable television.
Making what can
only be called an ingenious use of their lack of money, the directors hired
three young actors to portray the film students, gave them cameras, and
turned them loose to record their improvised reactions to situations
given to them in notes left for them in the forest. Instead of being
given scripts, the actors went through a two-day course on how to shoot
video and were then sent into the woods to hike, eat, sleep, and film everything
in sight. Their contracts said they would be frightened and harassed,
but not placed in any real danger. The actors were trained by the
film's producer, Gregg Hale, a veteran of the Army Survival School who
told them, "You are going to be cold, you are going to be hungry.
We are going to **** with you, mercilessly." Then the actors were
left to deal with the dark, the cold, the rain, the sounds, the sights,
the lack of rest, and the situations given them by the directors, while
filming their own reactions to their predicament.
The result was 20 hours of film
that was reduced to 87 minutes of what some critics are calling the scariest
motion picture they've seen in years, all without special effects
or on screen violence. The horror is all in your head.
The movie
promises to be an extraordinary experience for fans of the horror genre,
but it is important to understand that it is all make-believe. There
is no Blair Witch (or legend thereof), no Blair Witch book, no dead film
students, and no mysteriously missing locals. The web site is all make-believe,
created to support the movie and intrigue potential viewers. Even
the directors have expressed their surprise that some people don't realize
that this is all fiction, but that's all it is. Relax, my friends,
it's just a movie.
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