10 Ways Horror Movies Got Scarier By Accident
4. The Cast Got Lost For Real - The Blair Witch Project
The entire ground-breaking conceit of The Blair Witch Project is that its handheld "found footage" style and unknown cast duped audiences into believing that it might actually be real footage we're seeing - back in 1999, at least.
But one of the big reasons the movie works as well as it does is because principal actors Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard were largely left to improvise the experience from a shell script.
Filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez meanwhile provided scares throughout the night and also kept in occasional contact via walkie-talkies to provide directions and ensure the cast's safety.
The actors were also given a pre-programmed GPS to guide them and provide an escape route in the event of disaster, yet even in spite of this, they reportedly got lost three times during the shoot, on one occasion even seeking refuge at a nearby house on the edge of the woods.
Between these incidents, it's easy to see how the cast's very real frustration fed into their characters' increasing fear and hysteria throughout the film. Quite brilliantly, fact and fiction were melded into an 81-minute final cut from over 20 hours of footage.