Twenty-five years ago, the indie horror blockbuster compelled audiences to ask, “Was that real?” The question now permeates our age of misinformation.
“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.”
Audiences packed elbow-to-elbow into theatres in the summer of 1999 saw that shaky white text on a black background during the first moments of The Blair Witch Project. What followed was 80 or so minutes of growing dread as three 20-somethings – Josh, Heather and Mike – tried to uncover the truth behind the legend of a supernatural entity called the Blair Witch. It does not end well for the trio.
Initially shot for just US$35,000 ($58,000), The Blair Witch Project grossed almost US$250 million ($414m), then a record for an indie film. It became a pop culture phenomenon, one that foretold the found-footage horror boom and left one uneasy question hovering over moviegoers: “Is this real?” It’s an existential riddle that looms larger than ever 25 years later, compelling us to apply that exact question to nearly every image, sound or nugget of information we encounter.
Back then, creating that air of uncertainty took some strategic work by directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Marketed as a documentary, promotional materials included “missing” posters for the film’s largely unknown lead actors – Joshua Leonard; Heather Donahue, now known as Rei Hance; and Michael C. Williams – who had to keep ultra-low profiles in the lead-up to the film’s release.
A separate faux documentary called The Curse of the Blair Witch, which aired on cable TV shortly before the film’s premiere, had an eerily convincing true-crime approach: it incorporated candid-seeming photos of the characters including childhood snapshots, as well as fake newspaper articles and interviews with actors posing as Heather’s film professor and Josh’s girlfriend, among others, to round out the alternate reality.
At the core of the extensive world-building for the film was a humble website where Myrick and Sanchez laid out the back story for the Blair Witch. Just as important, it served as a discussion board for the curious, smartly leveraging the burgeoning internet.
“We just made it a place where people could have a conversation with us and explore the mythology,” Myrick, now 60, said in a joint conversation with Sanchez in June. As more visitors came to the site, more questions were asked, which “put a fire under our butts to put more information up,” Myrick said. “No one had really been doing that to that extent at the time and utilising the web in that way.”
Leading up to the release, the directors grew concerned that they had pushed the “true story” angle too far – particularly when a police officer who used to work in the area where the film is set reached out to them about the case. Myrick was, as he put it, “sweating bullets”.
At the midnight premiere, in July 1999, the line at the Angelika Film Center in New York City stretched around the corner. Some moviegoers bragged, according to a New York Times report, that they had already seen bootleg tapes.
David Viola, a 22-year-old New Yorker, said, “If it wasn’t for the web, this movie would be nothing.” His friends all nodded.
Sanchez, 55, recalled the director duo’s optimism that their unorthodox campaign would resonate. The internet was the perfect size, “the perfect kind of machine to spread things out,” Sanchez said. “There was enough time, enough room for the misinformation that we got out there.”
“Obviously,” he added, “we had no idea what was going to happen.”
In the 25 years since, the concept of misinformation, which moved hastily into the mainstream around 2016, has changed drastically. It is often argued that The Blair Witch Project could never be replicated, a debate that still pops up frequently in online forums like TikTok and Reddit, where recent posts have racked up millions of views and thousands of comments like one from last year that asked, “Did audiences really think The Blair Witch Project was real?”
“People legit believed it was real. There wasn’t ANYTHING like it yet,” a Reddit commenter replied, echoing a chorus of similar responses.
But could The Blair Witch Project phenomenon happen today? Its creators are conflicted. “Everybody’s so cynical about anything that comes through,” Myrick said. “No one believes anything, and they believe everything at the same time. It’s really weird.”
When shooting began, the three Blair Witch leads were sent into the woods without any written dialogue. Leonard, Hance and Williams each received an outline, but only as it related to their own character. They were given camping gear and camera equipment, with which they filmed all the footage used in the movie.
In her review for The Times, critic Janet Maslin wrote: “They actually wielded the film’s cameras, and they were left cold, hungry, lost and increasingly angry, just like the characters they play.”
Worse, they had no idea how they would be toyed with.
Myrick and Sanchez were committed to injecting realism back into the genre, intentionally blurring the line between fact and fiction to move it away from the satire that had come to define ‘90s horror (exemplified by Scream). For this feature, their first, the duo also wanted to create the feeling of a living nightmare. As fans of the television show In Search Of …, which explored folk mysteries like UFOs and Bigfoot, they sought to tap into a childhood state of mind, when the fear of the unknown overlaps with an openness to believe in the seemingly unbelievable.
With the help of Gregg Hale, a producer, they tracked the actors using pre-cellphone, military-style GPS, and each night would try to provoke real fear, frustration and panic. Much of the fighting in the film wasn’t feigned.
Myrick said the eight-day shoot had been mentally and physically exhausting. “There was no sort of stop and start, and there was no action, cut,” he said. Their mandate was authenticity and spontaneity. The actors, he added, “were uncomfortable by design”.
In an interview with Launch CD-ROM magazine in 1999, Hance called the movie “very raw,” playing into interest in Cops and The Real World, two of the only reality shows on the air at the time.
“People are used to seeing that and relating that to reality, you know what I mean? They see video, then it must be real,” she said.
Hance found especially curious viewers’ almost frenzied reactions. “When people see us, they’re just like, ‘Oh we’re so glad, we’re so glad you’re still intact, you’re not dead,’” she said. “I find it kind of weird that people do think we’re dead. I think it’s beautiful that people want to be scared so much that even when they see those credits roll, they’re still like, ‘Was that real?’”
At the film’s release, it was unusual for audiences to perform the mental gymnastics required to get through it – to engage the parts of the brain that decipher whether something is “real”.
Twenty-five years later, it has become our default mode, leaving us to perpetually doubt our senses and, in turn, wonder en masse what is real or what is outright deception; what is staged, scripted or performed; what’s made by humans and what’s been generated by AI.
The legitimacy of photos of human faces, of restaurant reviews, of music, of historical images, even from seemingly trusted sources, is no longer a given. So-called catfish, people who fabricate online personas for any number of motivations, continue to proliferate. And AI influencers that look human seem poised to slip into our social media feeds.
Everyone brings a different level of credulity to it all – a schism made worse as entertainment and news, both jockeying for the same real estate in our lives, bleed together.
Technological innovation, fragmentation and commercialisation “add fuel to the fire” in the push to make news more entertaining, Stephanie Edgerly, a Northwestern University professor who specialises in misinformation and youth audiences, said in an interview last month.
It’s a question, she said, that prompts more questions: “What makes people want to share news, tune in longer, connect more with people, want to spend more money and buy subscriptions?”
These questions move news “a little bit away from the facts,” Edgerly added, fostering confusion. To further complicate matters, “people tend to believe what they agree with, what they think is news,” Edgerly has found in her research.
“If it comes from a news organization that tends to be associated with a political viewpoint that we support, we tend to think of it more as news,” she said.
With their Blair Witch website, Sanchez said he and Myrick similarly capitalised on confirmation bias, the impulse to seek out information that confirms existing views. Now, as the internet continues to swiftly expand, it’s nearly impossible to avoid the algorithm-fuelled echo chambers that reinforce our beliefs. Along with the scourge of misinformation, modern-day boogeymen can seem more real than ever.
“Everybody is at a different starting line,” Edgerly said. “People can have and should form different opinions about things, but I do think we’ve lost that there are concrete facts.”
That dynamic was evident in the divide that quickly took hold after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump last month. Almost immediately, conspiracy theories circulated online and the word “staged” trended on X.
“The shooting came at a time when the United States was already deeply polarised along ideological, cultural and partisan lines – split, it often seems, into two countries, even two realities,” wrote Peter Baker, the Times’ chief White House correspondent.
Not even innocuous home videos posted online (say, of a humorous tumble on an icy step or a child sneaking an early bite of birthday cake) are immune from distrust and scrutiny, with commenters often suggesting that seemingly candid moments were staged. Of course, with so much of day-to-day life recorded, filtered and shared, what is considered real can easily feel inescapably, inextricably performative.
Experiencing life through a lens was once such a bizarre prospect that when conceiving the idea for the film, Myrick and Sanchez obsessed over the plausibility of its central storytelling mode: why would Heather keep filming despite being lost and hunted in the woods? Today, that question wouldn’t even need answering. Our feeds are filled with first-person footage of war, natural disasters, concerts, strolls down city streets and every human experience in between.
The intimacy of audiences seeing everything her character sees “because I never put down that video camera,” Hance said in that 1999 interview, is “really scary”.
Looking back at Blair Witch now, a conversation between the three leads eerily foreshadows our current wrestling over reality. After taking the camera from Heather, Josh remarks:
“I see why you like this video camera so much. It’s not quite reality.”
“Reality says we got to move,” a jittery Mike responds.
“No,” Josh replies, “but it’s totally like a filtered reality, man. It’s like you can pretend everything is not quite the way it is.”
In 1999, the grey area between truth and fiction, where the person seated to your left believed the opposite of the person seated to your right, was contained safely with the movie’s run time. And as we all left the theatre, we collectively realised it was all a ride.
Now, in a way, that ride never ends. And perhaps most unnerving is the knowledge that each one of us is living in an increasingly unique version of the world, making reality less of a communal experience than ever.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Maya Salam
Photographs by: Nicole Bengiveno
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
