The Blair Witch Project Marketing and Influence on the 2000’s Horror Genre

At the turn of the twenty-first century the internet was a very different place, “google” had yet to become a verb and signing on to the internet involved having a legion of robotic demons screeching through your PC. In this pre-apocalyptic wasteland of disposable AOL trial discs and indestructible Nokia 5100 phones, information that was “out in the wild” was not nearly as easy to verify.

When it was released on July 16, 1999, The Blair Witch Project left audiences terrified, unsure if the events they had just seen unfold on screen had actually happened. Set against the backdrop of the Burkitsville, Maryland wilderness, the film follows three student filmmakers setting out to make a documentary about “The Blair Witch” with disastrous results. Shot almost entirely from the first-person perspectives of Heather, Mike, and Josh, writer-directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick took full advantage of their limited budget by using archaic technology, an extremely loose script with completely improvised dialogue, and one of the first viral internet marketing campaigns to create an influential horror classic.

The Blair Witch Project was met with positive critical acclaim, currently holding an 87% on Rotten Tomatoes. (“Rotten Tomatoes”) Famed film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his four-star review:

“The Blair Witch Project is an extraordinarily effect horror film, knows this and uses it…at a time when digital techniques can show us almost anything, The Blair Witch Project is a reminder that what really scares us is the stuff we can’t see”. (Ebert)

However, most audiences had an extremely negative reaction to the film, earning Cinemascore ratings of “an F and D- by men and women 35 and over” and “C+ for the 21-34 age range”. In keeping with the contrasting reception this film was met with, it was nominated for and won an Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award while at the same time being nominated for worst picture and worst actress at the 20th Golden Raspberry Awards.

These conflicting receptions may leave room for debate as to the artistic merit and legacy in general of The Blair Witch Project, but the box-office success of the film is indisputable. According to Cinemascore President Ed Mintz, “It was so well marketed that before people knew they didn’t like it, it had hit $100 million”. Utilizing an innovative marketing campaign and making the most of a shoe-string budget, the film would go on to gross over $240,000,000. This success would go on to revolutionize the film industry and create a “found-footage” sub-genre that would dominate the horror film industry for a little more than a decade.

The box-office in 1999 was dominated by big-budget showcases of advanced film technology, utilizing cutting-edge CGI and in the case of The Matrix, creating new ways to film scenes that left audiences awestruck. Films like Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, The Matrix, The Mummy, Wild Wild West and Toy Story 2 were dominating the world-wide box office, raking in over 2.5 billion dollars as a group. (“Box Office Mojo”) However, while these films were box office successes, they cost an average of around $100,000,000 to produce. These ballooning budgets made it far more difficult for films to turn a profit and were a much larger financial risk for major film studios to produce, often standing to lose tens of millions of dollars per film.

The 13th Warrior, which was also released in 1999, is a prime example of these risks. Helmed by Die Hard director John McTiernan and starring Antonio Banderas, who had been near the top of the box office in 1998 with The Mask of Zorro, The 13th Warrior certainly had the ingredients of a successful blockbuster film. Unfortunately for those involved, the film’s budget grew to nearly $160,000,000 and when it released it made a mere $62,000,000 world-wide over its theatrical run. This potential for similar losses up to $100,000,000 is a key reason why the success of The Blair Witch Project was noticed and emulated by major film studios over the course of the 2000’s and early 2010’s. Directly contrasting with The 13th Warrior, The Blair Witch Project was produced for a paltry $60,000, featured no recognizable stars, only had a 35-page story outline for a script and this was the first project for the film’s co-writers and co-directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick who were only recently out of college. For all intents and purposes The Blair Witch Project had no reason to succeed. However, there are several factors that laid the foundation for its ultimate box-office success, with its innovative marketing campaign being the most important.

Viral marketing campaigns were not something consumers in the late 1990’s were very familiar with. There had been a few instances of them leading up to The Blair Witch Project, but none saw the same level of success. Starting with its website, the filmmakers created a plausible backstory for the events of the film by including behind the scenes photos staged as news reports, mock police investigations, biographies of each of the main characters, and interviews with people close to the case. Furthermore, Artisan Entertainment and Haxan Films went so far as to edit the online presence of the film’s stars by changing their status on IMDb to “missing, presumed dead”, which was so effective that actor Joshua Leonard’s mother received condolence cards. (Marthe) In addition to this online presence, The Blair Witch Project used other non-traditional marketing techniques to raise a unique sort of awareness about the film.

“People tend to forget that the offline campaign was so well integrated into what they did on the Web---the missing posters of the unknown cast, the TV spots perpetuating the myth that missing footage was found and they should go to the site and see more” (Highley, 39)

B-Roll and behind the scenes footage was also used to create a mockumentary special on The Sci-Fi Channel prior to the film’s release, which added more fuel to the “is it real?” fire. These separate marketing fronts expanded the mythos of the Blair Witch, creating a new sort of mystery that pre-dated the Making A Murderer “true crime” explosion of the 2010s. Since the internet was a much different, hamster dance filled place, verifying the authenticity of this information was much more difficult than it is today. This “is it real?” debate helped spread the word about the film and kept it in the collective pop-culture consciousness for several months, sending more people to the theater despite the low cinema-score and poor audience reception. `

Movie studios through the 2000s attempted to replicate the success of this marketing campaign with limited results; films like District 9, Super 8, Cloverfield, and The Last Exorcism used similar methods but did permeate the cultural bubble in the way that The Blair Witch Project did. Despite the questionable success of these viral marketing campaigns, movie studios pressed ahead, flooding the market with similar found-footage films. Existing as a unique sort of cinema verité filmmaking, these found-footage horror movies draw inspiration from a wide range of genres and often are presented as having been “lost” footage of some event or tragedy that has been “found” and edited into a digestible format. Found-footage films often have a loose narrative, are usually presented from a first-person perspective, and have very limited extra diegetic elements. Furthermore, these films are usually directed by unknown individuals and feature a small cast of unknowns and are filmed in “real-life” locations with readily available consumer electronics, making these films incredibly cheap to produce. Hollywood, being inclined to make the most money by spending as little of it as possible, flooded the market in predictable fashion.

Prior to the release of The Blair Witch Project in 1999, you could count the number of found footage movies in existence on your hands alone. Cannibal Holocaust in 1980 was perhaps the most influential of these, with The Blair Witch Project taking many of its marketing and aesthetic cues directly from it, almost to the point of homage at times. However, after 1999 and the runaway success of The Blair Witch Project, there have been beyond countless found footage horror movies produced, often with very poor critical reception and very limited box-office successes.

The Paranormal Activity franchise is an exception to this rule however, raking in close to $900,000,000 worldwide with a budget of around $29,000,000 over the course six films. (“Box Office Mojo”) The first film in this franchise, not unlike The Blair Witch Project, had an innovative and very successful marketing campaign, that even in the age of the internet, led to “is it real?” questions from audiences world-wide. The found footage genre even found ways to adapt to the rise of the internet age, with movies like Unfriended and its sequel Unfriend: Dark Web taking place entirely on skype video chats, filmed in an ultra-immersive cinema verité style. As more time has passed since The Blair Witch Project revolutionized the horror genre and with Hollywood behaving as Hollywood behaves, the market has been inundated with these found footage films.

The tent-pole Paranormal Activity genre saw a 50% decline in box-office earnings from 2011s Paranormal Activity 2 to 2012s Paranormal Activity 3 and another 50% decline with 2014s Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones. (“Box Office Mojo”) These are sure signs that the genre is, for the most part, dead. Yet, the found footage genre, as influenced by The Blair Witch Project has found a new home in video games.

The release of games like Outlast and Outlast 2 serve as an appendix to and perhaps the next chapter of the found footage film explosion of the 2000s. Heavily influenced by films like The Blair Witch Project, the player is placed in the shoes of a journalist searching for the truth about an abandoned psychiatric hospital, experiencing innumerable horrors through the lens of a battery-operated digital camera. This first-person interactive cinema verité experience and its sequel were extremely well received critically. Furthermore, they were produced by a small independent studio, on an extremely limited budget, and reached a large audience due to an innovative marketing campaign. This, just as it did after the success of The Blair Witch Project, has gone on to influence industry giants like Capcom to reimagine their classic horror franchise Resident Evil as a found footage experience. Lastly, in August of 2019, a video-game sequel to the film version of The Blair Witch Project was released to critical acclaim and massive sales success. As odd as it may seem for a 1999 film to get a sequel in the form of a videogame nearly 20 years after its release, the industry shift towards interactive media may give rise to more examples of this in the future.

To this day the artistic merit of The Blair Witch Project has remains a divisive topic. Despite the film’s innovative marketing campaign, excellent critical reception, and its box-office successes, the legacy of this film seems tainted. Released into a very different film landscape, especially in terms of horror, audiences didn’t seem to understand what they were seeing. The deep divide between the audience and critical reception is a testament to the film’s experimental nature. This avant-garde approach created a deeply immersive and personal experience that “lends disorienting power to off-screen space, which, being infinite and aurally unpredictable, is immensely larger and scarier than the space we do see.” (Atkinson, 74)

In an era where horror movies like the Scream (1996), Ghost Ship (2002), and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) were “showing” audiences what it was to be scared and telegraphing that horror with giant neon arrows, The Blair Witch Project didn’t show them anything; leaving them to their own devices and expecting a certain degree of participation aside from just “seeing” the film. Scream became “the most successful slasher horror franchise just by parodying their predictable behavior and the genres clichés” (Caro) Hollywood quickly created new clichés and turned this innovative cinema verité filmmaking method into the “McDonalds” of the horror genre---something cheap, easy, with a marginal reception.

As audiences have learned how to set their expectations, learning what a “found footage” movie was supposed to be, the critical reception and box-office returns of these films have dropped dramatically over the last decade, effectively killing the genre over three years. However, this death has given rise to a similar new movement in the video-game world, with similar cinema verité like experiences releasing at a rapidly increasing pace. With the return to “prestige” horror films such as Hereditary, The Conjuring, and Us, the movie industry appears to have left most of the “found footage” horror conventions behind. Ultimately, The Blair Witch Project is a massively influential film, leaving its fingerprints all over the film industry for over two-decades.