“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…”
With a new Blair Witch film on the way, let’s talk about the legendary marketing campaign behind 1999’s The Blair Witch Project. Considering its impact on internet culture and shaping studios’ relationships with the World Wide Web.
The Blair Witch Project was made by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez on a $60,000 budget. It raked in over $245 million at the worldwide box office. Not to mention pushing the term “found footage” into any household with a cinephile. An incredible feat for a film made outside of the studio system with no major stars attached. A lot of the early success is due to its strategic showing and the first-of-its-kind online marketing campaign.
The Website
Now, to some people, the idea of a film or piece of media promoting itself online may not sound groundbreaking. In 1999, however, the internet was still new territory for Hollywood. The first website made solely to promote a film launched in 1994 for Stargate, followed soon by Star Trek Generations. These are both big IPs that were aimed at Sci-Fi fans who are stereotypically pretty tech-savvy. The studios invested in websites that would gain better traction than most other titles, making it a safer bet.
So, to use a similar campaign on a low-budget horror film with a cast and crew of relative unknowns just a few years later sounds like an awful idea, right? Well they filmmakers and producer Haxan Film launched one in 1998. Just a few months before The Blair Witch Project made its Sundance premiere. Not too long after that, so-called fan websites started popping up. Websites that Salon, at the time, pointed out sounded very similar to one another. Accusing Haxan of trying to fake hype to build real hype.
The official website amassed 20 million page views before The Blair Witch Project even hit theaters. This traffic often caused the site to crash, another thing critics said producers were doing to generate buzz.
Fake Buzz For Real Buzz
It is confirmed that the production had people go into chat rooms and message boards casually asking about the Blair Witch and the film. This was done to build the myth around the fictitious legend of the Blair Witch and the missing students.
To keep traffic up, the website was regularly updated with information about the missing college students. In turn, this further deepens the illusion that this could all be real, not just a market stunt for a movie. (Which it very much was.) The production partnered with IMDB to keep the illusion going; all actors were listed as missing and presumed dead.
The Blair Witch Project was then screened at 40 different colleges in 20 key markets. Adding to that cult-like mystery that producers were using to generate word-of-mouth buzz. Even adding the ritualistic theater experience-driven movie watching that people like Jason Blum and James Wan are currently fawning over with movies like Obsession.
Marketing, at the time, was limited to small teaser trailers and wanted posters. Every single piece of marketing material directed people back to the website. Including the full page ad the team took out in Variety, which didn’t even advertise the film, just the website and how much traffic it was getting
It wasn’t about getting people to see a movie anymore. It was about getting people to believe that the Blair Witch was real and that these kids were really missing. Building a creepypasta long before the term even existed. Then came the fake documentary with the Syfy channel (Sci-Fi at the time), Curse of the Blair Witch. MTV ran a news story about it soon after, followed by a theatrical teaser trailer before The Phantom Menace. It is a full-on cultural phenomenon by this point.
The Damage
It wasn’t too long after the film’s national theatrical release that people realized it was all bogus. A lot of that ire was taken out on the film’s stars, Heather Donahue and Joshua Leonard. “It was my mother getting sympathy cards; it was people coming up to me on the street telling me that they wished I was dead, saying they want their money back,” Leonard told Vice in 2016.
“It’s very hard for me to talk about the backlash because for me it was so directly personal,” adds Donahue in the same interview. “It was my mother getting sympathy cards, it was people coming up to me on the street telling me that they wished I was dead, saying they want their money back. It was me in my 84 Toyota Celica breaking down in LA in La Cienega underneath a billboard with my own face on it.” She concluded, “It was a profoundly surreal experience.”
Yes, some people were genuinely mad that a few college students didn’t wander into the woods, get lost, and die. The weird part is other people knew the students were just actors, but believed the Blair Witch existed anyway…
Is The Blair Witch Project Impossible to Repeat?
We’ve seen a lot of indie filmmakers try to duplicate The Blair Witch Project and all, but Obsession has fallen flat. To be fair, Obsession also reversed this a little since director Curry Barker already had a strong online following. That helped translate into early audience buzz. But the similarities in its bare-bones pre-release marketing campaign are undeniable.
The reason most of these efforts fail is that studios try to generate fake buzz. For example, doing things like putting plants on message boards. The problem is that these posts are by new accounts that immediately start making posts about the IP they’re promoting. Online communities are a bit more savvy and often develop their own individual cultures. When someone uses this promotion tactic, it comes off hollow and disingenuous… because it is. While the posts about The Blair Witch Project were also disingenuous, this was the early days of online chatting. New accounts were nowhere near as big a red flag. People were also a bit less attuned to the sounds of fake posts.
While hoaxes like MoMo show that the internet is far from immune to trickery. But it’s nowhere near as easy as it was in 1999.
