Pizza & A Movie 78: "The Blair Witch Project"
“I'm scared to close my eyes, I'm scared to open them! We're gonna die out here!”
1999 • R • 1h 21mins • Watch trailer • Rent it
🎓 Class of ‘99: Two scary movies from a mythical year
You’re reading Pizza & A Movie—eating our way through rental classics and their backstories. This time we’re finishing a Halloween two-parter I’m calling Class of ’99, cherry-picking two frightening flicks from one of cinema’s best years ever. Why is it the best year ever? We covered that last time. Tonight it’s 1999 and we’re running through the woods in search of what to do with weird homemade video before YouTube exists. It could only be The Blair Witch Project.
Here’s the plot. We’re watching the shaky camerawork of three film students, Heather (Heather Donahue), Mike (Michael Williams) and Josh (Joshua Leonard), from five years earlier. The footage remains; the footage-makers do not. The trio are in Maryland interviewing locals about the legendary Blair Witch. They also get a lot of material on a loner from the ‘40s named Rustin Parr. Guy lived in the woods. He nabbed seven kids, dispatching them in pairs while one stood in the corner. Very specific—you know this’ll come up again.
The doc-making three explore the cursed forest Parr lived in. While camping there, they hear spooky night sounds, lose some of their stuff, bicker, get lost, get the rest of their stuff slimed, and kick their only map into the river. An average camping trip, honestly. But when Josh vanishes, things go from weird to bad. Can they find more of him than his shirt and teeth? And, hey, isn’t that Parr’s house up ahead? And what’s the Yelp rating on this campsite anyway, did anyone check?
A funny thing happened on the way to the write-up this week. The thing is: I got sick. One of those raw-throat-no-energy colds. Didn’t think much of it for the first couple days. But this ailment’s been going all week. Pal, that’s no cold. No, it’s the curse of the Blair Witch. Small comfort is that I’m far from alone. My curse this week came from watching The Blair Witch Project, which was cursed first. Lemme tell you about it.
It invented a cursed genre
Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity owe it all to the Witch. So does half the offerings under “Horror” on Netflix. The glut of straight-to-VOD found footage schlock started with The Blair Witch Project. The time was just right. Enough normal people had camcorders that a film about truly, deeply misguided youths filming in the woods was possible. It didn’t take a budget to be knuckleheads anymore.
Almost all of it was improvised
“How’d they make this,” you ask? How does cínémá like this come to pass? Were the filmmakers hunched over the keys for months, wiping toil-derived beads of sweat from their weary brows? Shaking their heads at each other, muttering “it’s not there yet” and going back to hone further? Regrettably, no. The two writer/director responsible, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, were cursed with what’s known in the dark texts as “improv”. These guys scratched out a mere 35 pages of “script” for their whole movie. Made their actors figure most of it out after that.
Curse of the bro
“How’d they find actors,” you ask? Myrick and Sánchez put an ad in a rag for their movie. Got 2,000 applicants. Sorted ‘em by making them do improv exercises based on off-the-dome prompts like, “You've served seven years of a nine-year sentence. Why should we let you out on parole?” “These sound like cool, professional guys,” you say. “Doesn’t seem at all like boys running a movie like a fraternity,” you say.
After securing three actors who could stand getting hassled just for applying for a job, Myrick and Sánchez gave them zero lines. Or much direction to speak of. Instead, the bruo dished out a scant few details on how to act for the day each day. They also planted clues on-set for where to go next. The actors had to figure it out on-camera. The two also limited their actors’ access to food and sleep. Myrick and Sánchez haunted their own production.
They only shot for 8 days
The bad time in the woods lasted barely more than a week. Shooting began on October 23rd and wrapped on the 31st. They finished on literal actual Halloween. “Did the camera crew get to trick-or-treat?” you ask? Great question with a horrifying answer. The three actors who star in this? They shot everything except one scene. The camera crew? BooOOoo there wasn’t one! Blair Witch didn’t use the unseen doc crew conceit made famous later by The Office. The actors themselves did all the work, which does add to the realism.
The marketing was genius
How’d Myrick and Sánchez get the word out about their weird micro-budget spook-‘em-up? The Internet, at first. They made a fake news website (ahead of their time!) that seemed to document the real-life story of the film’s making. When the flick went to Florida Film Fest, the filmmakers pasted missing person posters for the cast everywhere. You gotta remember, this was 1999. Blended reality marketing wasn’t a thing yet. The cast’s IMDb listings even said they were dead or missing for the first year after The Blair Witch Project premiered, demonstrating a maniacal commitment to the bit. The actors used their real names in the movie—it all seemed real.
How you really get teens to your movie for teens? Give it away like a sketchy Solo cup at a frat party, that’s how. Blair Witch screened at 40 college campuses so kids would tell each other about it. Which they extremely did.
But perhaps the marketing people’s most diabolically genius tactic was this. It was the summer of ’99 and America was sick. Sick with Star Wars fever. And the only cure was a little movie you mighta heard of called Episode I—The Phantom Menace. What the Blair Witch folks did? You’re not gonna believe this. They put their movie’s trailer right before Episode I. Ensured it played for the biggest possible audience while positioning their flick as genius counter-programming. And it worked, oh boy, it worked.
It came out in the middle of the summer
“Wait, The Blair Witch Project came out in the summer,” you ask? I know what you’re thinking. An October release would be lay-up! Sometimes yes, but sometimes no. Halloween seasonal releases live or die on what fickle minds are in the mood to get spooked by. Summer, on the other hand, works for anything. Bored overheated teens go to the movies. Friday the 13th? Came out in May. Hereditary? June. Nope? July. Blair Witch hit wide release on July 30, 1999.
It was the ROI of a lifetime
How’d it do? Buckle up, it’s budget time. Creepy numbers! The Blair Witch Project’s initial cost was around $25,000. That’s what they’d spent when shooting wrapped. The available budget was said to be $35,000, though some say upwards of $60k. But that’s only what filming cost. You got hours of footage that still needs editing after that, not to mention marketing. All told, the spend grew to the ballpark of $500k. For scale, The Sixth Sense, which came out four weeks later, cost $40M.
Over its 16 weeks in theaters, Blair Witch made a twist ending total of $249M worldwide. Yes, that is a return of 4,150 times the original budget. Like they made some kind of deal with the devil.
That’s The Blair Witch Project, a millenium-ending phenomenon that created a whole horror genre, the curse of which remains to this day. It’s the end of our Halloween double-feature, Class of ’99. I’m already thinking about a follow-up pairing from the ’99 cellar though. What a great year!
Next month, Pizza & A Movie returns for a couple movies about family. But not the getting-along type. More on that next time.
Thanks for reading! And thanks for hanging in there for a looser-than-usual sick week retelling. Hope you enjoyed this one. And if you did, send it along to a pal who would too! Don’t let ‘em enter the woods alone.