Bill Dreggors

The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 American supernatural horror film written, directed and edited by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. It tells the fictional story of three student filmmakers—Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard—who hike in the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland in 1994 to film a documentary about a local legend known as the Blair Witch. The three disappeared, but their equipment and footage is discovered a year later. The purportedly "recovered footage" is the film the viewer sees. Myrick and Sánchez conceived of a fictional legend of the Blair Witch in 1993. They developed a thirty-five page screenplay with the dialogue to be improvised. A casting call advertisement in Backstage magazine was prepared by the directors and Donahue, Williams and Leonard were cast. The film entered production in October 1997, with the principal photography taking place in Maryland for eight days overseen by cinematographer Neal Fredericks. About twenty hours of footage was shot and was edited down to eighty-two minutes. When The Blair Witch Project premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 25, 1999, its promotional marketing campaign listed the actors as either "missing" or "deceased". Owing to its successful run at Sundance, Artisan Entertainment bought the film's distribution rights for $1.1 million. It had a North American release on July 14, 1999, before expanding to a wider release starting on July 30. While critical reception was mostly positive, audience reception was split. The film was widely regarded to have popularized the found-footage technique, later used by similarly successful thriller films such as Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield. A sleeper hit, The Blair Witch Project grossed nearly $250 million worldwide on a modest budget of $60,000, making it one of the most successful independent films of all time. The film spawned two sequels—Book of Shadows and Blair Witch—released in October 2000 and September 2016, respectively. The Blair Witch franchise has expanded to include novels, dossiers, comic books and additional merchandise.