10 Crazy Tricks Directors Tried To Pull On Audiences

In 1999, the internet was still in short trousers: long before the advent of fake news, the ‘information superhighway’ was a trusted source. If it was online, it was real. Right?

In those pre-social media days, that’s what people believed - so when Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez introduced the online marketing of their new horror movie as though it represented real events, they didn’t run into a lot of resistance.

The Blair Witch Project was a found-footage movie, the progenitor of the genre. Myrick and Sánchez had always found documentaries on the paranormal scarier than traditional horror movies, so their film was shot on a shoestring budget as though by the protagonists on camcorders, the idea being that this footage had then been found after their disappearance.

The film’s website bolstered this approach by featuring fake police reports and newsreel-style interview footage, and the filmmakers themselves referred to the movie as being factual, with flyers distributed at film festivals urging people to come forward if they had any information about the missing subjects of the film. A documentary on the legend of the Blair Witch was even released in time for the release of the film.

There was no Wikipedia or Snopes in those days, no easy google to set people’s minds at ease. The debate the movie sparked was unreal: for months afterwards, people speculated about the provenance of the film and whether it was genuine footage or not. It remains one of the most profitable movies of all time.