By the following winter, half the town's children had disappeared.
#THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT 2016 IMDB TRIAL#
She was found guilty at trial and banished to the woods, where she was tied to a tree in the dead of winter and left there. As it's pieced together by the townspeople in The Blair Witch Project and in the companion documentary, Curse of the Blair Witch: In 1785, a woman named Elly Kedward was accused of witchcraft in Blair, Md.-later Burkittsville-after she was discovered pricking the fingers of children to let their blood. The back story is briefly touched upon before things get weird for Heather, Josh and Mike in the woods, but Myrick and Sánchez have said they wouldn't mind fleshing out the lore in another film. "There's a common misunderstanding that not a lot went into it," Myrick told The Guardian in 2018, "but it took two years of effort to make it look like it was just shot by three students over a long weekend." Williams and Joshua Leonard hiked into the Black Hills of Burkittsville and never came out. Meanwhile, 1994 is the stated year in which "student filmmakers" Heather Donahue, Michael C.
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The movie was shot over eight days, in Germantown, Md., Seneca Creek State Park and the Griggs House, in Patapsco Valley State Park. Over the next several years, they came up with the Blair Witch lore, hired a few unknown actors who could do improv, scraped some money together and production got underway in October of 1997. In and around 1993, they were talking about horror movies-and the recent drought of truly great ones-when they thought about the potentially terrifying consequences of a group stumbling upon a house in the woods and not being able to resist going inside, despite knowing that something appalling was happening. Not to mention, no one was racing to Facebook or Twitter to spoil the fun.ĭirectors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez met as students at the University of Central Florida School of Film. Same with that shaky, hand-held camera technique. That took some getting used to as well, and there were reported occurrences of nausea and vomiting.)īoosted by a rather ingenious marketing campaign that teased the film entirely as the product of tapes discovered in the woods of Burkittsville, Md., after an unknown but presumably horrible fate had befallen three student filmmakers, The Blair Witch Project benefited from the kind of organically grown anticipation that's hard to duplicate these days. (The idea wasn't conjured out of thin air, but it certainly didn't become a full-fledged thing until 1999. Now it's been 22 years since The Blair Witch Project in all its haunting, low-budget glory landed in theaters and launched a new genre of horror movie: found footage. Two years later, their footage scared up almost $249 million. In 1997, two directors and three unknown actors disappeared into the woods, toting handheld cameras and a concept.