9 Horror Movies That Got Too Real As You Watched
6. Audiences Think The Blair Witch Project Is Real
As silly as it might sound to younger horror fans, there were a great many people who believed that The Blair Witch Project was real leading up to its 1999 release, that we really were watching footage recovered from the woods in Burkittsville, Maryland that belonged to three missing filmmakers.
This worked for a few reasons - the film itself doesn't show anything explicitly supernatural, the filmmakers took full advantage of the Internet to market the film virally, and the three central cast members, Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard, were forbidden from making public appearances for a year after the movie's release.
And so, it was easy to believe that the trio were indeed "missing, presumed dead," as their IMDB stated at the time, and we were seeing what might be the final video testament of three doomed film students.
Ultimately of course it was just a perfect storm of the movie's envelope-pushing found footage style and canny marketing in a less media-savvy era of the Internet.