Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel
Myrick both attended and graduated the University of Central Florida; it was
during this time that they came up with the idea of The Blair Witch Project. Having just graduated film school, the
pair were on a tight budget and had to produce the film through their small
production company; Haxan Films. Over the years, the film established itself as
one of the most profitable independent American films ever made.
The Blair Witch Project was made for a very little $22,000 and to keep
costs down, they returned their most expensive camera back to the store they
bought it from after using it, saving them around $10,000. Initially, Sanchez
and Myrick created a short trailer to try and get financing for the film. They
made the trailer out to be a mini-documentary and caught the attention of John
Pierson who ran a piece on his television show Split Screen. He did not tell
anyone that the footage used wasn’t real and managed to convince viewers that
what they just witnessed was factual.
The film premiered at
Sundance Film Festival where The Blair
Witch Project soon became the ‘buzz’ film and faced many sold out
screenings. One of the production and distribution companies from the new
emergences in the late 1990s was Artisan Entertainment (Yannis, 2013); they
picked up the film for $1million and spent another $1 million on promotion.
Thankfully, the film was promoted around the time of the boom of the internet, so
they managed to use a cutting-edge marketing technique by making it go viral,
and most importantly, it was free. Lead actor Michael C Williams in an
interview said “The internet was new! So if you think back, some of the things
you read on the internet you go, ‘Oh that must be true. I saw it on the
internet.’ Just like when newspapers came out. You believed what you read”
(Meslow, 2015). The filmmakers had their own website where they posted unused
clips from the film, news articles and interviews, all trying to show audiences
that the film was real. Artisan worked with them to grow the website and used
it as one of their main marketing strategies, as well as creating fake missing
person flyers and listing the actors as ‘missing, presumed dead’ on their IMDB
pages. Their audiences believed that it was in fact a real film, so much so
that Heather Donahue’s mother actually got sympathy cards from friends
believing that her daughter died during the making of the film.
Another marketing
strategy that they used was to make audiences feel like it was something that
they wanted to get involved in. When the film was released across the United
States, they limited screenings so that they sold out days in advance, making
the film greatly in demand as viewers wanted to see what all the hype was
about. Sanchez and Myrick took out an advertisement in Variety magazine simply
stating "Blairwitch.com, 21,222,589 hits to date” (Blair Witch, 1999). One
of the co-directors of Sundance said "I've never seen an advertisement,
ever, in which a company takes out a Variety ad about the number of hits to
their Website. That says something about how the campaign for this film has
worked.... They've really made people get involved with a sense of wanting to
be involved with this film, wanting to be a part of the feeling around it”
(Carvell, 1999). Fortunately, their marketing strategies worked to a great
scale as they made over $248 million at the box office, making it one of the
most profitable films ever made. Yannis explains that “Despite the clear
affirmation of indiewood films as the dominant expression of independent
filmmaking from the late 1990s onwards … independent films of all kinds and
modes continues to be made” (Yannis, 2013), and it’s true – the success of The Blair Witch Project proves this.
In David Bordwell’s
essay The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice he states that “The art cinema
motivates its narratives by two principles: realism and authorial expressivity”
(Bordwell, 1979). As far as authorial expressivity goes in The Blair Witch Project, both directors had complete control over
the way their film was produced; it was made in their own way and was of an
unusual style. The shoot was 24 hours a day, for eight days straight, allowing
the actors to completely submerge themselves into their roles. They thought
that they were left alone in the woods to make the film themselves, with the
directors leaving them capsules every so often with written instructions for
scenes, food and water, but in fact the directors were there with them. Sanchez
and Myrick camouflaged themselves so that they could get more of a reaction
from the actors by making unnerving noises and shaking the tent at night.
The Blair Witch Project goes against most classical narrative rules,
especially the three act structure and cause-effect linkage. The film does have
the first act, albeit a very short one; the actors are introduced to the
audience and their goal is stated. The next act which would be the development
is just the rest of the film, as there is no resolution. The film makes it way
to its climax (unbeknownst to the audience when watching it, as there is no
build to it), and then it ends, making it one of the most infamous, ambiguous
endings ever. For cause-effect linkage, there are many, many other examples –
Josh disappearing and never returns, children are heard screaming and there are
none to be found, the actors walk for 15 hours in a straight line and end up in
the same place and teeth are placed outside their tent but it’s unknown how
they got there.
As for the realism
aspect, The Blair Witch Project is
the epitome of it. The film is shot on location, with unknown actors, all of
the sound is diegetic, the composition lacked and the only light used is
natural light from the light on the camera, which is natural in the characters
universe. The camera is hand-held all
the way through, so they audience see everything from the characters point of
view. We are restricted for what we know, as we are learning and seeing things
at the same time as the characters. Since the three actors were all amateurs at
the time, their knowledge on how to use the cameras wasn’t very good. There is
one scene in particular where the three are interviewing a woman named Mary;
the scene is significantly out of focus and shows their inexperience, but this
works in favour of the film as it adds credibility to their characters
authenticity. Also, one key detail that helps with the reality of the film is
that as soon as the closing credits come on screen, the audience will be able
to see that their characters names are in fact their real names too.
In Bordwell’s essay, he
states that “Most important, the art cinema uses “realistic” –that is,
psychologically complex-characters . . . the art cinema is less concerned with
action than reaction” (Bordwell, 1979) and in The Blair Witch Project, the characters all fit this bill. The film
doesn’t concentrate on action, but instead focuses on the psychological
breakdowns of the characters. The filmmakers wanted to show this, so they wrote
notes on their instructions for scenes, such as "Heather knows more.
Heather is not telling the truth about all this stuff” (Meslow, 2015) to try
and build tension between the three actors. From this, it wore the actors down
from being apprehensive of one another and really allowed them to show their
most primitive state with their emotions running high.
The film covers a short
time span of only one week, but due to so much repetition of their activities
and because the setting of the forest looks the same wherever they walk to, the
time span feels a lot shorter. The only other locations used a hotel room and
the town of Burkittsville, but these are only featured in the opening ten
minutes of the film.
Independent films
usually cast as few stars as possible, but with The Blair Witch Project, there were no stars at all, in fact for the
three actors who starred in it, it was their first ever film. The obvious
reason being that it brings production costs down, but it adds to the realism
as the actors aren’t familiar faces that audiences have watched in films
before. As well as the three main actors, the townsfolk that they interview
before going into the woods were also unknown faces. What is so good about everyone
that appears in the film too is that they are just ordinary people, the type of
person you’d see walking down the street – no one special or extraordinary,
meaning that there was a greater chance audiences would believe that the film
was real.
Ultimately, Sanchez and
Myrick created an independent American film - they produced their film how they
wanted to, and with an extremely low budget that had audiences both excited and
horrified. The pair strived to make the film as realistic as possible and showed
how far word-of-mouth advertising could take them.
Works Cited
Blair Witch. 1999. in Variety. 19 July, 44
Bordwell, D. 1979. ‘The
Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Film
Criticism, vol. 4, no.1 (Fall), 56-63.
Carvell, T. 1999. 'How
The ‘Blair Witch’ Project Built Up So Much Buzz'. Fortune, [online] Available at:
[Accessed 27 March 2015].
Yannis, T. 2013.
‘Independent’, ‘Indie’ and ‘Indiewood’: towards a periodisation of contemporary
(post-1980) American independent cinema. In: American Independent Cinema: indie, indiewood and beyond. Oxon:
Routledge. 28-40.
Meslow, S. 2015. The
Blair Witch Project: An oral history, Part 2. The Week, [online] Available at:
[Accessed 02 April 2015].
No comments:
Post a Comment