10 "True Story" Horror Movies That Tricked You Into Believing Them

10. The Blair Witch Project

There's no getting around a list like this without a hearty nod to the granddaddy of film fakery, really, so here it is. The Blair Witch Project is the OG movie that toyed with audience's heads, a proponent of the found footage genre that shot the filming style to fame by packing it full of more shaky cam than you could... well, shake a cam at.

And the film's success was largely born from the fact that nobody knew it wasn't real. Filmmakers Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick framed their movie in the widely re-used style of a true story, with the documentary-gone-wrong format and 'found footage' style reinforcing the idea that this wasn't as much a film as it was a plea to find three people missing in extraordinary circumstances.

Myrick and Sanchez used internet marketing to their advantage to push this even further, releasing the film alongside staged interviews, a website populated with fake police reports, and their own version of a documentary on the Blair Witch that supported the fictional horror story. Couple this clever manipulated with how little people knew about internet technology in 1999, and they soon had audiences flocking to cinemas to watch a 'real-life' paranormal encounter play out on screen.

It's one of the most infamous tricks in the horror genre, and rightly so considering its cultural importance.