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This raised eyebrows and piqued curiosity among audiences: was this a terrifyingly real documentary or was this a brilliantly-marketed Horror flick?
#The blair witch project 1999 magazine covers movie#
Even after purchasing the movie’s distribution rights, Artisan Entertainment stuck with this theme, and before its theatrical release in July, TV commercials advertised the movie as real-life events.
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Before its debut at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, “missing” and “deceased” posters were circulated of the actors, bolstering the authenticity of what audiences were about to witness. Twenty years ago, this was a monumentally unique idea and the film’s media and marketing were brilliant. Their equipment and subsequent footage is recovered, and voila! This found footage is exactly what the viewer is seeing on the big screen. The story here is simple: in 1994, three film students researching the local legend of the Blair Witch hike into the forest and disappear. Williams ( Altered 2006, The Objective 2008)-all made their feature acting debuts in the film. Its stars-Heather Donahue ( Seven and a Match 2001, Taken mini-series), Joshua Leonard ( If I Stay 2014, Togetherness series), and Michael C. Okay, sure, there are a handful of less commercially successful films that predate The Blair Witch Project (1980’s Cannibal Holocaust being a prime example), but most critics and fans would agree that The Blair Witch Project popularized the sub-genre and made it what it is today.Īll groaning about Found Footage aside, in the summer of 1999, a little movie set in the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland would blaze a trail out of nowhere to turn the Horror genre on its head. We knew it was a movie, but Daniel Myrick ( Solstice 2008, The Objective 2008) and Eduardo Sánchez’s ( V/H/S/2 2013, Supernatural series) The Blair Witch Project purported itself to be discovered footage, or what would come to be known as “found footage.” At the time of its release, the film was arguably one of the very first instances of this new technique in the Horror community.