20 Things You Didn't Know About The Blair Witch Project

Along with the very real Salem witch trials and classic creepy stories from history, The Blair Witch Project also pulled inspiration from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.

Now, you may ask what a found-footage, woods-set movie about a banished witch has in common with a film about a killer shark, but it’s the approach of Spielberg in Jaws that inspired and influenced directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez.

In Jaws, the atmosphere of terror and dread is largely conjured up by what the audience doesn’t see – the shark largely unseen for the majority of the movie. That, of course, was a happy accident due to the infamous technical problems that plagued the shoot and the shark.

For The Blair Witch Project, Myrick and Sanchez went with a ‘less is more’ approach when it comes to its nefarious threat – only they took this concept even further and didn’t actually show the Blair Witch at all.