The success bolstered the movie's creators and stars into Hollywood, but the movie's urban legend marketing campaign plagued the actors, whom many believe died in 1999. In anticipation of the new movie, Broadly spoke to The Blair Witch Project's original writers, directors, and actors about the film's deranged eight-day production and how the movie scarred their lives.Writer and directors Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick met as film students at the University of Central Florida in the early 1990s. The friends collaborated on a number of student films before deciding to collaborate on a horror movie.Read more: Shonda Rhimes on the Making of 'Crossroads'
In the Beginning
A New Cast in the Woods
Sanchez: The [actors] would come into the room and we would immediately start grilling them with certain questions. We told people during the audition, "As soon as you come into the room, the audition starts." That worked for a lot of people, and it didn't work for others. There were a lot of actors that came in and just didn't understand.Donahue: Dan, Ed, and Greg set up improvisation scenarios for us, so when I went to audition, they said to me, "You have served half of your sentence for killing your baby. Why should we let you out?" And I looked at them and said, "I don't think you should." And I think I was the only woman who actually said that, and so I got the role.Joshua Leonard, actor: I wound up getting Blair Witch because I had some acting experience and because I knew how to run a camera, which is what I was doing freelance a lot of the time at that point. I think I was in that state that a lot of young people in New York are, where I thought, Maybe I'll go be a photographer, or a documentary filmmaker, or a spoken word poet, or an actor, and I just kind of followed whatever was deemed cool at the time.She was a very driven woman who didn't wear mascara and was on camera in 1999.
The Campers Go to Maryland
We shook their tent, we played sounds of little kids playing outside their tent, we made noises in the middle of the night, we led them to this crazy house at the end—we basically just played the Blair Witch.
Donahue: I had actually done a student film two years before with a young female filmmaker who definitely had a lot of bravado. I had to think, "What kind of woman would actually keep the camera running through horrible times?" A normal person would have stopped filming, so I had to take that character to that extra driven edge. I don't think there were a lot of female characters like that in movies at the time. Definitely I feel like things have changed a lot. There's been a little more leeway for female characters. I won the Razzie for worst actress that year, and I think that was partly because of the character being judged, rather than the performance. She was a very driven woman who didn't wear mascara and was on camera in 1999.Sanchez: The actors were great, they didn't really shy away from anything, they were very brave to do what we asked them to do. And I think that they trusted us and that was probably our biggest accomplishment during that time, just to be able to tell these actors, "We're going to do all this stuff to you, we're going to have you in the woods 24 hours a day, and we're going to scare you at night," and they trusted us—somehow they trusted us.I don't think there were a lot of female characters like that in movies at the time.
The Myths of the Movie
Myrick: We probably startled them, but I can't imagine them really being scared. For example, the final scene with the house, it looks like it's all one take. Heather's shrieking in the house, and it looks like she's losing her mind, but we shot that over multiple takes and over two days—that was one of the most traditional segments of the movie. We had to really set and reset and be careful walking through that house so that nobody got hurt. It was much more orchestrated. Nobody was scared. They were tired! The real fear that registers on their face is just pure performance.Leonard: You've always got in the back of your head, "This is not Colonel Kurtz going up the river in Heart of Darkness. This is not the Apocalypse Now shoot where you're there for a year and slowly lose your minds."' This was, "Let's be clear, this is an eight-day shoot," so there was always a level of acting that went into it, because, you know, we weren't actually out there for that long. That said, I think the techniques that Ed and Dan and Greg and those guys used to make us uncomfortable and pump up the conflict, you know, [were real]. It was actually cold, we were actually hungry, we were actually tired—that certainly played into it.
The Unplanned and the Infamous
When Everyone Thinks You're Dead
[The Blair Witch's success] is something you have to live with, like a tumor or a tattoo on your face.
The Blair Witch Backlash
Donahue: It's very hard for me to talk about the backlash because for me it was so directly personal. 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. It was a profoundly surreal experience.Sanchez: For the audiences that did get it, it was a very intense and unique experience. For the people who didn't get it, it was a lot of shaky video footage.Donahue: I had no experience with the camera, as is evidenced by my shaky camera style. Apparently a lot of people threw up, so I feel kind of bad about that.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.