8 Horror Movies With Creepy Urban Legends
7. The Blair Witch Project Was A Real Documentary
Arguably the most creative and interesting thing about The Blair Witch Project is the marketing campaign that grew up around it, with the film's creative team going to some lengths to invent a plausible backstory for the supposedly true events of the film, which included laying the groundwork for an urban legend, persisting to this day, that claims that the footage itself is genuine.
The website for the film went further into the mythology behind the story how a woman accused of witchcraft was exiled from her village of Blair, Maryland; how half the town ended up going missing over the next year, causing the area to be abandoned; how, even after a new town, Burkittsville, was founded on the same spot decades later, unexplained murders and abductions continued to take place for the next 150 years.
The story concludes with the note that, in 1994, three students decided to travel to Burkittsville, Maryland to film interviews with locals about the legend as part of a class project. They then vanished in the woods nearby, and despite a massive search from local authorities, not hide nor hair of them was ever seen again until their video recorder was found beneath an old building in the area months later. The footage they found forms the basis of the film. Of course, it's a brilliant fake.
The rare book that the students apparently read about the Blair Witch legend doesn't exist. Nor does the hermit who allegedly ritualistically tortured and killed seven children in the 1940s on behalf of the ghost of an old woman. The manhunt for those missing students in 1994? Apocryphal. The film was marketed as being genuine footage (in one of the last instances of such a thing being possible, with the advent of the internet) - but it wasn't so, all of the actors being hired to roleplay their characters in the woods improvising their parts based on notes and an outline of the story. This lent credibility to the supposedly real-life footage, but none of the stories were true.