This year The Blair Witch Project celebrates its 10th Anniversary. Earlier this month we brought you our retrospective discussing BLAIR’s influence on the horror genre and indie filmmaking at large. Today BLOODY-DISGUSTING goes to the men behind BLAIR WITCH, co-directors Ed Sánchez and Dan Myrick, to talk about their recollections of the phenomenon and discuss the ongoing legacy of their ground-breaking little DV movie that could. Both men are currently working on their own projects and discussing a BLAIR WITCH sequel idea that they plan to take to Lionsgate before the end of the year (read that story here).
BLAIR WITCH was released in late July 1999, but BLAIR had been garnering buzz for months before theatrical release, from mysterious bootleg tapes to web sites hinting the documentary-style footage was uncovered in relation to a missing persons case. The internet was just coming into its own and Sánchez, who designed the brilliant web site, found just the right ingredients to tap into a new (and free) promotional tool. “I was in charge of the site because I’d had some web-building experience and I had the most time,” Sánchez told Bloody-Disgusting with a chuckle. “I was the only one that didn’t have a girlfriend at the time. I would edit and then I would just basically work on the web site and that was my life. The reaction I was getting from the shit I was putting on the web site, for a completely unknown filmmaker from Orlando, FL, it was like, `We’re really hitting a nerve with this.’”

“It certainly legitimized [internet viral marketing],” says Myrick. “It showed that if you’ve got a compelling idea and you approach it in the right way, it can catch fire and you can let the audience do the work for you.”

Along with the web site, the filmmakers sent VHS copies of the movie to festivals that were subsequently pirated and distributed just about everywhere (one even got into the hands of this humble writer in mid-1999). “I started getting emails from people that had seen the movie,” says Sánchez. “The tapes we had sent to Sundance and other festivals, people had copied them. I got an email from a guy in Japan. The reaction we were getting from those bootleg copies was just ridiculous.”

Even with all the buzz, Ed and Dan weren’t sure exactly what they had. It was getting strong response at the festivals, but the question of whether the movie would get the chance at mainstream success still loomed large. “We did a platform release and Ed and I were at the Angelika Theater in New York,” Myrick tells BD. “Just out of curiosity, we went up to the box office to watch people buying tickets for our movie and every showing was sold out until like 1 a.m. I’m like, `Okay, this is weird.’ We’ve got something here.’”

As the old saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and BLAIR soon received lots of flattery. “All the parodies that came after BLAIR WITCH were ridiculous,” laughs Sánchez. “Some of them were funny. We stopped watching them after a while because there were so many. You know, it was such an easy movie to spoof.”
Not long after that, a new and steady stream of BLAIR-influenced features, TV shows and shorts started popping up, from those utilizing the shaky-cam home video ideal to first person narratives. “There was a TV series that came out shortly after BLAIR,” says Myrick. “I’m trying to think of the name of it, but it was first person. They would try to set up a scary scenario and they would send each person in with a first person camera. I was like, `That’s a straight line from BLAIR WITCH to this TV show.”

Perhaps the first mainstream breakout with a direct connection to BLAIR was 2003’s OPEN WATER. “I’m sure they were influenced by BLAIR, but I think more by the low budget kind of attitude,” says Sánchez.

“The thing with OPEN WATER that it had similar to BLAIR WITCH was a great core nugget idea,” adds Myrick. “I remember everybody kind of sitting at lunch and going, `Aw, man, what a great kind of right on the bulls-eye concept.’ You’ve gotta go see that. That was what BLAIR had and I think that’s why OPEN WATER generated so much buzz, even though when you watch the film it was obviously a narrative. It wasn’t shot in the same first person conceit, but you didn’t care. It had that same kind of low tech light to it and it worked.”

Over the years, countless releases can probably be connected in some little way to BLAIR. In our retrospective, we mentioned OPEN WATER along with MY LITTLE EYE, ZOMBIE DIARIES, REC and even Romero’s DIARY OF THE DEAD. For both Sánchez and Myrick, the films they consider most closely connected to BLAIR didn’t hit screens until much, much later.

“I think a lot of people involved with the filmmaking process regrettably didn’t really understand why BLAIR worked,” explains Myrick. “[They] didn’t really understand how much work went into making it look like no work went into it. We auditioned over 2,000 actors until we finally nailed down the three that worked. That’s the hard theory to get across to some of these people. It’s still storytelling, it’s still a narrative, it’s still execution. The conceit behind BLAIR WITCH was very methodically planned out and we went to great pains to make sure it looked very real and authentic. When you disrespect or simply don’t understand why BLAIR worked you wind up making bad copies of it.”

“CLOVERFIELD to me was the first one that I was really like, `Wow,’” Sánchez tells BD. “Why did it take people so long? I loved the idea that it could be done on such a big scale. It was a different kind of film. [It] was scripted out. They made it feel very natural, but all the things that were being caught in that party, all the little moments, there’s no way that could really happen unless you had ten cameras in that party. But they did it well. The audio, you can tell it’s like manufactured to sound bad. With BLAIR WITCH, that’s all the audio we had. So there’s a little bit of a difference. There’s a little bit too much convenience in CLOVERFIELD, at least for me.”

“I was quite envious [of CLOVERFIELD] actually,” says Myrick. “Many times after BLAIR WITCH I’ve said to myself, `I would love to take the BLAIR WITCH conceit, this first person camera thing, and apply it to like a big Sci-Fi movie or something like that where you don’t have these super-pretty Michael Bay visual effects. It’s all down and dirty kind of documentary-style visual effects.”

This year PARANORMAL ACTIVITY has taken more than a few pages from the BLAIR history book, both in terms of the film’s look and the marketing, in which it is proudly being proclaimed, “the next BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.”

“Whenever I see a project where they’re saying, `This is the next BLAIR WITCH PROJECT’ there’s a part of me that smiles and a part of me that cringes a little bit,” admits Myrick. “You know, that was a once in a lifetime, lightning in a bottle kind of thing and I don’t know if I would make that claim quite yet.”

“PARANORMAL ACTIVITY is probably the most true to style as far as BLAIR,” says Sánchez. “It just feels very real. I like the idea of randomness in these movies. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY is a little too convenient sometimes. For me, the big thing about first person cinema is, `Why is the camera still running? Why are these characters still taping themselves being chased by shit?’ For us in BLAIR, that was a big struggle for us, especially the end. It’s like, `Why the hell would they still have the cameras?’ But at that point you’re so wrapped up in the film, they don’t notice that.”

“It’s kind of come full circle,” adds Sánchez. “I know the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY guys were inspired by BLAIR WITCH and after watching their film it’s kind of inspired me to do something kind of in the same genre but put my own twist on it. That’s what my next film, POSSESSION, is.”

Ten years removed from the phenomenon that was THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, we asked Ed and Dan what they would do differently if they were to make BLAIR now for the first time.

Dan: “I would pay everybody a little bit better, but honestly I don’t think we would’ve or would do anything differently. BLAIR WITCH took the typical shortcomings of low budget filmmaking and turned them into strengths, so I wouldn’t want to undermine those strengths.”

Ed: “I would have ruined it, really. The whole idea of BLAIR WITCH was an idea based on economics. We had to no money and I think the problem now would be we would have access to money and we just wouldn’t do it the same way. We would fuck it up somehow.”