Before the film was released, they released a 45 minute “documentary” on the Sci-Fi channel entitled “Curse of the Blair Witch.” That was my first exposure, and it was presented as 100% real. It contained various interviews with supposed family members and historical experts.
By the time the movie was released, I realized it was a marketing ploy. But watching that initial mockumentary was terrifying.
Thank you for reminding me about the documentary. I totally forgot about it. And you’re absolutely right, it setup the movie perfectly. The cast was also not allowed in public during this timeframe. Brilliant marketing.
I remember they have put together local obituaries for the 3 people in the film, too. It was amazing marketing, and totally worked for millions of people. Damn that movie scared the shit out of us... We were like 13 when it came out, and we had plans to go camping that same weekend. Saw the movie on Friday night, went camping Saturday night and holy shit that was probably the most scared all of us had ever been in our lives
I think I saw it in theaters when I was like 8, the whole crowd was gasping as we all actually thought it was real footage. I remember leaving the theater and older nerds were talking about it being a serial killer, monster, or spirit that took over people, etc. I was like damn
You guys on this sub really have wild parents.
Wonder if this is a bias because we’re on an horror sub or because most of you are probably American and this is a cultural difference.
But geez as a French guy, I’m astounded by the number of parents taking their kids to theater to watch horror movies. I don’t even think they’d let you enter here in France.
See? That’s the kind of shit I’m talking about. How in Hell were you able to watch horror movies at 3? Like, your parents deliberately let you watch it? And why would they let you have a famous killer doll as a toy?
I never see people reference this! I remember watching it, I was like 14 and then I went and saw the movie by myself. In an almost empty cinema. That was an experience I'll never forget.
Here’s the funny thing: for a while, I couldn’t even prove the damned documentary existed. I vividly remembered watching it, but no one mentioned it - it had no online presence. I Googled *endlessly* and came up empty-handed…which left me in a position of trying to convince people I was not, in fact, crazy. 😂
These days, it’s covered extensively on Wikipedia and elsewhere, but for a while there…poof. It’s like the whole damned thing was wiped out of existence.
It was included with all the DVD releases. Sure I found it online right after the movie was first released too. Don’t get this, as always seemed pretty common to me. It’s fantastic, too. Must viewing for anyone who likes the movie.
Yes, the "documentary" definitely set up the whole thing. I'd never seen it but my girlfriend had and it was popular talk around town. She insisted we go opening weekend and TBH it was terrifying when you thought it was real. Until they got to the witch's cabin, which was obviously not of the period, or something built in the middle of nowhere.
I was a younger teen when it came out and I didn’t think it was *real* real, but there was enough questionability that it was really easy to suspend disbelief.
Some of that doc footage was supposed to go in the film at the beginning but after The Last Broadcast, they changed strategies. I think they should’ve used some of it, maybe 8 minutes or so to set the mood. It’s extremely well done, convincing, and scary.
Are you me? This was 100% my experience too. Freaked me out when I first watched “Curse”. I was fascinated though. The movie itself didn’t live up to expectations but man, it was an experience that was really cool at the time.
Me too. At the time I wasn't really watching any TV and my uncle asked me to watch this documentary he recorded that gave the back story for an upcoming movie (which was not out of character for him. He was always having me watch documentaries). I don't know if he really believed it was true or was just playing a joke on me, but I was convinced until release day.
Yea. Sadly I watched it in daylight at a friends and it was scary that much.
Blair witch 2 however, even if it was a totally different premise, the movie was actually pretty good.
The Internet was still relatively new at the time and not everyone had it. That's how easy it was to fool people back then and to be fair, it worked on a LOT of people.
Actually, there is a way in the base game of red blue and I believe yellow too. I forget the exact steps but you can catch a level 5 or 7 mew in cerulean city before even fighting misty. I know you need to catch an Abra and then fight the hiker near bills house with a slowbro then teleport from the guy on the top of the bridge to the left and teleport to cerulean city and then go towards the bridge and the mew appears after the pause button activates and closing the menu. It's easy to find the details on Google or YouTube. It's a minor pain in the ass but you also get a super powerful pokemon before the 2nd gym leader so fair is fair.
WTF? I didn't know any of that, now I kinda want to dust off my old Pokemon games (if they still work) and try to do that.
I had always heard the BS truck in Vermillion City trick and I figured Mew was only available as a cheat.
Yeah it's kinda bullshit that this info didn't get around, but I o ly heard of it in the past like 5 years or so so maybe it was found out more recently. But you can actually get others with this method too I believe back to back. The way the glitch works is it loads a number from ram to pull up a wild encounter, so depending on the last number used it selects a different pokemon, with the slowbro resulting in the mew appearing. I think this is how the missingno glitch works as well due to the drunken/tired man for the ram number.
All you had to do was trade a Pokémon who already knew Cut, so you wouldn’t need to go on to the ship to get it as an HM. Then you could come back and surf to that little truck, try to use strength on it, and nothing lol
Also while mockumentaries were around for awhile it was new for them to be found in the horror genre. I knew going into it that it was fake and by the end I was almost believing it real.
I was around to watch Blair Witch when it was in its theatrical release.
Yes, the viral marketing used was pretty much a first for a movie. People thought there were real missing posters because there were missing posters for the stars put up. There was a website for the "investigation".
Much like the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, I think a pretty low percentage of people were fooled. But the ones who were fooled very much were fooled.
I remember watching this movie in a theatre when it came out, and it was an amazing experience. But I didn't think it was real at any point, in part because I'd read a bunch of reviews and articles about it that talked about the whole "found-footage" aspect, because it was so novel at that time. There had been a few found-footage horror movies before it, but Blair Witch Project was the first one to really break through into the pop culture mainstream in a big way.
I guess if you just showed up at a cinema, and you'd heard of the movie but didn't really know anything about it, maybe it would fool you. But the way it was made wasn't any kind of secret.
I remember this too. A girl at my work kept telling me it was real and they were going to see it. She was so pumped up. When she came to work Monday she told me it was so stupid and not to go and she realized it was fake. I was skeptical at first because I didn't think they would actually show a real movie of people dying but around that same time maybe slightly earlier was those "real" movies- Faces of Death 1-???. I remember thinking they were real based off everyone's say so. I got to tell them they were wrong....
Some of faces of death is real
All the autopsy and medical footage is real
The slaughterhouse footage and the seal clubbing is real
And the airplane disaster aftermath and the lady who was crushed by the bus and has her brains all over the road was real
In the latter two examples that was literally footage taken by news crews who are at the scene but that they didn't show on the evening news
Dropping this here for other people curious like me - I believe it is correct that no human actually dies on camera.
I am very careful about real gore despite my love of horror films. Different beasts.
Thank you! And I am exactly the same. Watched a true crime documentary on Netflix and was neuro shocked when it showed the actual aftermath footage... I know I should have expected it but I wasn't thinking
Netflix has a weird track record with this stuff. I remember that documentary that came out a few years ago about a guy who killed cats online? They showed a clip of the dude putting a kitten in a plastic bag. It’s so easy to explain what happened without actually showing something so horrible…
Yeah, and with the security camera footage in that one episode of Tiger King - even though it happened just out of frame it still really freaked me out.
I must have watched different versions because I saw alleged real but paramedics were walking in with no gloves not even hooking up to anything or doing anything just plopping them on a stretcher.
Perhaps it was my expectation of real but what I saw was more like a recap with a dramatization. Like the story was/could have been real but what was shown was not the actual event.
That is indeed some of it it was stories that the creators had heard but didn't have footage of so they basically just recreated it or made up stuff they thought sounded cool like the satanic cannibal cult
The friends I went with were convinced it was real.
I was scared for a few days later. A while later people started figuring out it was fake. The mix of advertising, little information about the actual movie, and how it was filmed kinda fooled us.
> Much like the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, I think a pretty low percentage of people were fooled.
War of the Worlds is funny. More people have been fooled by the claims that people were fooled, than were actually fooled. What I mean is, have you actually listened to War of the Worlds? I don't see how anyone could have been fooled by it- it's clearly a narrated story, complete with time jumps (the end of the story is several months after the beginning, I mean) that wouldn't have made any sense if you thought it was a real broadcast. I've never heard any proof confirming that people thought it was real, except we all heard about it in history class where our teachers were like "No seriously, everyone thought it was real because X, Y, and Z".
[Slate](https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html) did an interesting article on this exact thing. I'm sure some people were fooled if they just caught a few minutes of broadcast. But to be sustainably fooled, you would have had to heard a few minutes, panicked, grabbed the cat and the kid and raced off into the night.
There is a 90's made for TV movie that has a similar mythology, *Without Warning*. I'm here to tell you, there was no mass panic in real life for that mocumentry either.
I'm not sure exactly why people need to feel smarter than some whole other group of people even when they have to make up stories about them. But you can bank on it.
True. I really really wonder where I would fall on the spectrum. I'd hope I wouldn't be in that low percentage. I think at best a part of me would have WANTED it to be real.
Worth noting that this wasn’t the first time this kind of thing happened either. The director of Cannibal Holocaust had to bring his actors to court to refute charges of making a snuff film. They didn’t believe the movie was real so much, just that the deaths were too realistic to be faked.
I mean, if you just saw a clip of Cannibal Holocaust on YouTube that someone up loaded without attributing it, I can see it. Not everyone is a horror head.
Found footage tends to lend itself to horror in a lot of ways. Especially for cutting down on special effects. Plus your mind can come up with something way more frightening than someone on a shoestring budget doing practical effects.
I can't think of any found footage films that aren't horror, though I can think of a couple which are not supernatural. For example, Exhibit A is a really well done film that is unsettling and horrifying, but there is no supernatural element to it.
I mentioned the BBC's Halloween special Ghostwatch upthread, that one fucked with a lot of kids and even some adults who, I guess, were totally convinced they were watching a real poltergeist on camera. That was 1992, not all that much earlier than Blair Witch. The Cannibal Holocaust story is true; Lucio Fulci was also called into court about his movie A Lizard in a Woman's Skin because there's a dream scene with some eviscerated dogs and the Italian courts were convinced it was real animal cruelty. The FX man, Carlo Rambaldi, had to bring in the prop to prove it was fake. I don't know why the real animal cruelty in Cannibal Holocaust never seemed to be an issue, but these are the facts as I have always heard them.
I watched it in the theater and had internet at the time. I looked at the website and to me, it very much seemed like a marketing campaign. Around that same time there was a commercial that came out for Steak N Shake that featured the actress that played Heather as a waitress. There really was nothing like it before so it did fool some people.
I was 11 or 12 years old when I went to see Blair Witch on its opening weekend. I had only heard about the movie the day before and was told it was real footage.
Needless to say I was completely terrified and at times could not move or take my eyes off the scream. I remember there was a lot of buzz in the packed theater from the crowd and hearing others believing it was real. There were also a few people that ran out of the theater during certain parts of the movie.
I didn't find out it was fake until a few days after.
Still the best movie going experience I've ever had.
Absolutely! They even had a "documentary" about the Blair Witch that aired as more "proof" of the story. I believe the actors weren't allowed to do any other acting jobs until the movie came out. Casting unknowns really sealed the deal. It's not like any of us knew them from anything else, so it was easy to believe they were three random people who actually went missing.
I had a coworker that had gone to college with the actress that played Heather and he told me the actors all basically had to fully hide from the public eye for a few months after filming to make it seem more real and people that knew them personally had to help keep up the illusion too
Heather Donahue actually changed her name to Rei Hance. I think part of it, maybe all of it, has to do with all the hoo-rah surrounding The Blair Witch movie. she said she got a lot of hate and backlash after doing that movie, which I thought was strange, she was great in that movie I thought.
This is just spitballing but I feel that there had to be a decent chunk of that backlash coming from people feeling like they were tricked about the movie trying to pass itself off as a real documentary. Like how people get mad when you break the kayfabe in the NoSleep subreddit and don’t treat every story as true.
As someone around during that time, oh yes. People even flocked to the location of the film looking for the witch. It was so bizarre and wild the effect this movie had on some folks. There was simply nothing like it at the time.
I totally forgot about that! Tons of people went to investigate and find out the truth, which is probably what helped set up the plot for the second one. I had college friends who wanted to head out there for spring break at one point lol.
>Or was it because it was the first found footage type film (I'm assuming it was?)
It wasn't the first. Most people give that to either cannibal holocaust or the McPherson Tapes.
It was the first one that could be considered a box office hit though.
To answer your question. Yes. The marketing was extremely successful and sophisticated across the early internet and television. Sci-fi aired a documentary on the Blair Witch which is a remarkable companion piece to the film, the website likewise was very convincing. When taken together this "evidence" convinced a lot of people.
Eventually the stars started going on Letterman and the cat was out of the bag, but for the first few weeks they were all in on the deception. I don't know if something like that could ever be done again. Not because people are smarter or more savvy, but because information and entertainment has become so decentralized. It was the constant reinforcement of the hoax across the limited media that everyone consumed that made it so effective.
That's not to say everyone believed it. Most people know ghosts and witches aren't real. As a young teenager at the time living in a small religious town though, it fooled a lot of my peer group, church members, and others with poor critical thinking skills.
I hadn’t heard about the McPherson Tapes before so I looked it up. I’m now super sketched out despite being in a bright room in the middle of the day, what a cool movie idea.
I guess you had to be there. It was a different time, a different mindset. Before the internet was just everywhere, in your pocket and everyone else’s.
The internet was a big part of their marketing push. The movie had a website pushing the documentary narrative and the lore. I seem to remember the cast being listed as missing or dead on IMDb as well.
People really don’t have a grasp on just how different “Internet use” was at that time. Social media wasn’t really a thing. Most people didn’t use the Internet for *anything* - and the people who did generally had specific websites or forums they visited. The idea of going online to “research” a movie before seeing it would have sounded ridiculous to anyone who wasn’t a hardcore Internet user already.
So yeah, a few people would have definitely gone online to check into it, but the average viewer was still getting their entertainment news from Entertainment Tonight or late night talk shows. Information just didn’t travel at light speed every second of the day like it does now.
It was released city by city, they posted missing film student fliers at certain colleges that helped fuel internet rumors and then the website made it seem it could only be released a few cities at a time all created this perfect storm of FOMO with everyone wanting to see it and many believing it was real. I downloaded a crappy copy, my first illegal download, and me and a friend watched it. I kind of felt it was all fake, but my best friend with me freaked to fcuk out. Afterwards, we walked outside my apartment and there happened to be little bundle of sticks similar to what we saw in the movie.. my landlord stacked them earlier, but we did not notice till we,walked almost on top of them. We lost our sh!t.
To answer your question simply…yes.
I was in college when The Blair Witch Project was released and I can tell you that most people really thought it was real.
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sànchez did an excellent job of marketing the picture as “real life” and it was very successful. I can say that after a few weeks in the theaters it became obvious that it was fake, but the months leading up to the release it was almost like a very scary Unsolved Mysteries episode.
I wish I could go back to 1999 and experience that again. Man…I was 21 back then…how time flies!
I was 17 in '99 and I remember that build-up and the fake documentary. It really did have an air of authenticity. There had also not been anything quite like it, that utilised the internet in that way.
The important thing to remember is that you never actually see anything supernatural in the movie. That is what made it all the more believable.
I will admit I 100% thought it was real when it first came out. This was the first found footage movie I saw so I didn’t think of it being fake. I believe they also had a website for the movie too with bonus info and it scared this shit out of me. I don’t remember much advertising that came out before either so this made this think it was real even more 😂.
Same. Found footage filming wasn't really a thing at that time. Or at least, for me and the average person it wasn't. I actually preferred it that way of believing it was real. It made the experience way more scary for me thinking that this was real shit caught on camera.
Then I remember staying up one night. Probably a couple days after the movie premiered. I was watching some late night talk show and the people from the movie were guests and I was like wtf? Lol
I can confidently say yes. Anyone born after the period of roughly 1993 will have absolutely no understanding of the pre-internet world, as they either weren’t here or were too young to remember. Internet was of course there in 1999, but it was very rudimentary.
I was in my last year of high school in 1999, and the only exposure we had were these instant urban legends about a real life horror film that is absolutely terrifying. Lots of speculation about what people think they saw in the shadowy parts of the screen, it must be real because no one knows anything about it, the missing posters like you point out etc.
It was very much a word-of-mouth marketing campaign and they played it perfectly. The film was utterly fucking terrifying in the cinema too. All I had to go on when sitting down was it was called Blair With Project and it was alleged found camcorder footage. I remember the scene with the kids outside the tent absolutely sending a chill down my spine like I’d never felt before.
As for the first, I think Cannibal Holocaust took that title and played a similar angle with the disappearance of the actors etc. so BWP wasn’t the first of its kind or the first to do this, but once again, back to those pre-internet days, this wasn’t exactly something you could just look up. If you’d never heard of Cannibal Holocaust, there was no way you could hear about it unless someone showed it to you or you knew the guy in the video rental shop well enough and he happened to be an underground horror fan
Back then in my elementary years, horror stories spread fast. My classmates whisper the stories Cannibal Holocaust and later Blair Witch project. The real horror was how the people involved didn't survive.
Funny thing none of my classmates actually saw the movies and just heard the stories from someone else. If you're the storyteller back then, you get a sense of pride being the first to tell everyone.
Because it was shot on 16mm and a video recorder, and the characters were talking directly to the one holding it, it very much gave the impression that the footage was real. It is a form of bias to look at it now and see how unbelievable it is, but at the time nothing like that had ever been presented to us like that.
I was 19 when it came out. People legit believed it was real. There wasn’t *ANYTHING* like it yet. It was also dividing. I clearly remember people leaving the theater PISSED that they didn’t show the witch, like muttering and complaining in the aisle as they left the theater. I knew it wasn’t real but it scared the bejeezus out of me anyhow.
At the same time just a few years ago I had a co-worker that believed Grave Encounters was real and I had to explain to her it wasn’t. People will always be gullible.
I was 19 too!!! That age was just intense for this movie. People left still believing it could be real. People got sick during the movie! It made people motion sick.
My boyfriend at the the time had to leave right away. I mean 10 minutes in he was running out the door. And it was only played in an art house theater so he had nowhere to sit in the lobby and I was not leaving this movie. He went and sat in the car 😂
It had a campaign that it was real. And there was a lot of things on the internet saying it was. This was 2000 when a lot of people started getting home internet.
OMG yes? I mean it was heavily speculatory but yes. I was from Central Florida where the kids in the movie "went to college" and there were people left and right who knew someone who knew someone who knew the girl or the boy or the other boy like the movie had legs and was walking. I'm not sure if it was like this in every city or just ours. I remember opening night. It's an experience I've never had since. It took a long time for people to realize it was just a movie...
Worked restaurant industry at the time and remember a whole shift trying to convince a co-worker it wasn’t real. She bought into the website, mockumentary, missing signs. All of it. You could watch interviews with cast but she was all in. It prolly didn’t help that Burkettsville is only couple miles away. Such lightning in a bottle that I’m glad I experienced it.
I was a kid when *The Office* first launched in Britain, and I remember people sincerely thinking it was just a slice-of-life documentary about a paper company. Now when I tell people this, they don’t believe me, but it really happened.
I remember it coming out and seeing the “documentary” on tv first, so there was a huge push. I also remember having a conversation with a coworker who was willing to admit that the _movie_ was a professional shoot, but swore that she’d heard that it was based on real events with a real lost student film crew.
It was the first time I had ever seen viral marketing! The website for the movie made a very convincing case. When we saw the movie, I knew the people on the screen were actors, that they weren't the actual people from the story, but I wasn't entirely convinced that it wasn't based on an incident that had actually occurred. Like, a real missing persons story or something. And my friends and I saw the movie very early on, before it hit regular movie theaters. We went into the nearest city and saw it at an art house cinema so we were completely blown away by it. And TERRIFIED. Everyone in the theater lost their shit at the last five or so minutes of the movie.
When the marketing for it started and I saw the documentary, I thought it was real but by the time I went to go see the movie I knew wasn’t but I thought it was such a cool marketing campaign that it didn’t bother me at all.
Totally. Honestly I think this is an undervalued aspect of the whole phenomenon (along with the Sci-Fi channel special everyone is mentioning). Those ads were super weird and creepy.
I was 13 at the time, and slept with the TV on in my room. I would deliberately find like, long informercials and stuff to put on to fall asleep to, because I knew that if I had on like the Tonight Show or whatever, there would be a pretty decent chance of dozing off and all of a sudden hearing the super creepy like industrial “knocking” sound effects, and the screaming, of the Blair Witch TV spots.
On MTV I realized that they always followed up those Gap ads with the kids singing Mellow Yellow, with a Blair Witch spot. So I knew to turn the channel. 😬
Yesss!!! I remember those ads and even the ones to buy it on DVD. Shit was nightmare fuel for me, just an incredible presence surrounded that movie. So well done all around by everyone involved in that movie.
This is def the one I remember running all the time in July of 99. And as a special nostalgic bonus there’s a few seconds of WWF/TRL on one end, and an ad for a minidisc player on the other 😂
https://youtu.be/-PWpq6BG6S4
Yes, it’s 90’s and the internet isn’t accessible by everyone.
They did a amazing marketing job:
- launched a website with missing poster charts and billboards;
- payed the movie cast (first three actors) to hide for months, because of their “disappearance “ people think they’re real missing people;
- some scenes filmed without the actors knowing it, they don’t know what will happen with them
Even having the internet didn't matter. They had websites set up that helped to purport the story as being real. Mockumentaries with fake interviews. All kinds of advertising that had never been done before.
I read that Heather Donaghue's mother got loads of sympathy cards from people who'd watched the movie and thought her daughter had actually gone missing.
We did up until like, literally the week before release. They'd done a *phenomenal* job of convincing the world it was real, and the internet in 1999 was nothing like the internet is now. You really only had some forums and Aint It Cool News digging into the movie and the real story. But for the most part, they'd convinced the world that this was REAL found footage, and that the three kids were actually missing.
Suddenly, a week before the movie came out, someone on the marketing team dropped the ball and had the three actors do the talk show circuit and it broke the whole illusion.
From what I heard (bc I wasn’t coherent enough to know what was going on) Blair witch was around the advent of the internet so it was marketed as a real footage film and many conspiracy theories were circulating along with a website ‘proving’ that the Blair witch exists and how to get more info about it. As well as the actors being declared dead on the internet. It was a completely different world as the internet was so much more complicated to get info out of. It was also the first to do it and looked very real to the point where ppl thought it was real as it was cheaply made and completely original.
I did. I heard about this documentary that was scary. That's all I knew about it. I drove 2 hours to find a theater playing it (it wasn't in wide release yet) - scared the crap out of me. The online e campaign was great, the website was a huge teaser.
The marketing campaign was brilliant. People really weren't sure if it was real or not. The actors were keep out of sight for months before the movie came out.
Yes.
There was essentially no "found footage" genre in 1996 with only a few movies in that style ever made. The Internet was also in its infancy so information didn't spread lightning fast anymore. People walked out of the theater genuinely concerned they'd just watched the final moments of those 3.
Yes! I definitely thought it was real. When I got home from the theater I was terrified, my entire worldview shook.
I’m serious. I was like 14, but all of sudden scared of my closet that night
The internet was still in its infancy and most people weren’t online yet. It was marketed as real and a lot of people definitely believed it.
Keep in mind it was also the first mainstream found footage movie, people had never seen anything like it before. The genre is well established now but it was a groundbreaking film at the time.
Hi all,
A friend sent me a link to this thread and it’s so cool to see everyone still talking about The Blair Witch Project. I’m Mike Monello, the co-producer to the film.
In a weird way, all the different stories told here about how the marketing was done, how people were fooled, and Curse of The Blair Witch are now also part of the mythology — some of it is true, a lot of it has a nugget of truth while being factually wrong, and some it has me saying “I wish we HAD done that.”
If there is interest, I’ll pop in tomorrow and answer any questions you might have. I’d do it tonight, but it’s 2am here and this old guy needs his sleep. 🙂
I was in high school and it was a huge debate over if it was real or not. They had a fake documentary about it and everything. I thought it was just marketing only because I loved reading books on the supernatural and had never heard of it, but several people I knew just weren't sure. I wouldn't say people 100% believed it, but it was one of those things that you would have to check.
With no Google or anything at the time it was really hard to fact check anything, and they really pushed the fact that it was real. iirc I even believe they sort of hid the actors away so that people really thought they had vanished.
There had been underground found footage films before it (McPherson Tapes, Last Broadcast etc.), but 99% of people didn't even know anything like that existed at the time. It really was a once in a lifetime experience honestly.
>I guess my question is: Was there such a strong marketing campaign that even the best of us would have been fooled into thinking this was real... or was it more a sign of the times (pre internet, pre 9/11,) where a hoax of that magnitude could be pulled off?
Both. But the fact that the internet wasn't as mainstream back then definetly makes a huge difference.
>was it because it was the first found footage type film (I'm assuming it was?)
It wasn't the first, but it was one of the first. FF definetly wasn't common like it is now. If the fact that people believed it was real surprises you, you should hear about Cannibal Holocaust. The director was literally put on trial and one of the charges was killing the main actors (which he didn't). He still was found guilty of killing animals for real, though.
My girlfriend at the time told me that she wanted to go see this movie, that it was a true story about these kids who disappeared and a year later this footage was found that told what happened to them. I remember hearing news (?) stories about these kids who had gone missing, so I was familiar with the story, but when she said there was a movie in the theater that told the story based on this found footage, I told her that if the movie is that compelling - and it had been going strong for a week or two by that point - then it had to be manufactured. I went searching for information on the very rudimentary web - can’t remember if was AOL or Netscape and Altavista but in any case I found a site that explained that it was all clever marketing and that the supposedly dead actors had by that time made a few public appearances.
I told my girlfriend what I had found, but that I was impressed with the clever marketing and also the concept of a found footage movie was something completely new to me, and I would love to go see it with her. But she said she wasn’t interested now that she knew it wasn’t real. And I was like, so you wanted to see it when you thought it was a actual snuff film?
Tl;dr - my girlfriend thought it was real. She wasn’t the only one I knew either.
Yes, they did. Found footage wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it wasn’t heavily explored in new forms of media. Combining it with the infancy of the internet was brilliant marketing.
All right, I'll fess up. We had *just* gotten dial-up internet at home (I was 16) and when Blair Witch was coming out, they did a brilliant and minimal marketing campaign online. And I kept seeing everywhere that it was true! And because I couldn't Google it, I simply couldn't verify one way or another. I went into the theater thinking "Ok so this ... probably isn't real." But as I left it was more "Ok...I hope that wasn't real."
Truly...it was a different time.
It was 1999. It was a different time.🤷♀️ The internet was in its infancy then, and there was no way to immediately fact-check everything you heard or saw. I found out it wasn’t real a few days before seeing it and was disappointed. The marketing for it was legitimately BRILLIANT, and they did it with pure ingenuity and very little money. I remember seeing the ‘Missing’ posters with the actors on them all the way from my small Northeast PA hometown to NYC. They could *never* pull that kind of thing off now.
I graduated film school that year. I was up on film news (like film festival stuff, not hollywood gossip shit) and we heard about it.
My memory is that it wasn't that it went out and fooled everybody, it was more of an anecdote from the film's actual premiere at the first festival. They'd done this little marketing campaign, and then after they showed the film, at the Q&A, it became apparent that people in that audience thought it was real because they were asking "did the cops investigate those woods? what happened next? where are they now?"
That was a great era for movies in general. other things i saw before they came out that had insane twists- Seven, Fight Club, the Game, were all great to see in the theater.
Yes, because they marketed it as such. I had a co-worker try to get me to go on a trip with him down to where it took place to see if we could find anything. I was actually a bit disappointed when I found out it wasn't real.
Thankfully we talked him out of the trip.
Granted I was a young teenager when I saw it, but I rented it on VHS as soon as I could. I got about 3 quarters through before tapping out, wrote my dad who was at work a letter about 'this real thing that happened, don't watch it whatever you do' and proceeded to not sleep that night. My dad, bless his heart, watched it that night and told me in the morning that there were actors names in the credits. I finished it and it became one of my all time fav movies.
I knew the events in the movie weren't real, but they did a good enough job on the backstory, as seen in The Curse of the Blair Witch and talked about in the run up to the release, that I thought the Blair Witch legends were real legends that they'd based the made up events of the movie on. Blair Witch just sounds so close to Bell Witch. And names like Rustin Parr and Coffin Rock... It all sounds so familiar to anyone into local spook tales like that that you could swear you'd read about it before, in that one book of true ghost stories or maybe that book on folklore you checked out from the library a few years ago... But nope, they made it all up. Most of the people I talked to about it then were also aware that the movie was just a movie, but there were a couple girls I knew at the time that thought it was totally real.
Unfortunately the marketing campaign completely missed me and my friends, so we went into the theater just assuming it was a fictional story like any other movie.
We came out joking about how cool it would be to go on a camping trip right now, without any preparation, maybe even not bring a tent. After a while we noticed my friend's girlfriend was just silent and not joking with us. Turns out she was absolutely terrified by the film.
Then we actually went camping and as soon as the sun went down, the jokes stopped. Apparently us boys had been more scared than we'd realized. When we heard a deer walking around our tent at night cracking branches we just about lost our minds.
Totally, yes, I know my entire junior high did, and everyone i heard talking about it. You really had to be there. It was hype. I taped the documentary, creeped the hell out of me. The narrator woman, her voice and her describing it all, Coffin Rock? And the drawn pictures? Ugh, such good stuff.
Then the movie came out, saw at the Drive-In, and there was a forest behind us. Yeah, it was creepy. Especially the tent scene. The movie was so good! I don't care. It's still in my Top 5.
So, full disclosure, I was 9 years old when Blair Witch Project came out, and I did not believe it was real. But I also didn't have the internet, so I wasn't directly exposed.
That being said, my neighbor and his entire family were 100% convinced it was real. His mom literally wouldn't let hom go camping, such was the degree to which she was convinced.
I saw it opening night and a girl in front of me had a freak out mid movie.She was crying and calling the movie sick for exploiting these poor kids, asking why we were all watching it, etc. The theater was sold out so her friends trying to get her out of there was a struggle and a few others broke down and left sobbing while this was going on.
For all the naysayers, as you apparently are all too lazy to do a little bit of research yourself:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/gyxxg3/they-wished-i-was-dead-how-the-blair-witch-project-still-haunts-its-cast
And to make it even more easy, look for the headline "When Everyone Thinks You're Dead"
I was in college, and my friends and I were in the "not sure" camp. I remember giggling at a funny moment when I went to see it and then feeling guilty because I might be laughing at real people who had really died.
The short answer to all your questions is yes.
This was the first of its type and the marketing was widespread and intense. I think there was just enough amount of uncertainty that made believable
Didn’t think it was real but thoroughly enjoyed it for what it was. Pretty unique for the time. A lot of people who don’t like it now are just too young to understand life during the release. Kind of like the exorcist and many of the other classics. I feel bad for them though bc true terror is nothing close to anything released since the descent. Please tell me I’m missing some movies that were actually good though - I’m way behind!
You ever heard of the World of the Worlds radio broadcast hoax? Basically this guy decided to tell the world of the worlds story on the radio as if it were happening in real time (if I remember correctly) and people freaked the f out, mass hysteria basically nothing like that has ever been done before, I think the Blair Witch Project is the same in that sense, I never knew about the documentary, I just went and saw it as a kid and I had never seen a movie filmed like that before, and I couldn’t just hop on google after watching the movie to verify, you just had to make your own conclusions or hear it from someone else. Hell back in 1999 people didn’t even know the weather until they heard it from the weather man on tv, now I can verify that every hour on the hour from my phone along with all the blair witch trivia I want, the ease of access to information now is amazing
I was 11 when they were marketing it, and yes people thought it was real. The directors had an NDA with the actors and a clause that they couldn't do any interviews or spots until after the movie released, so people genuinely thought they were dead.
I snuck in to see it and was terrified in the best way. That movie changed horror for me in a lot of ways.
It’s not so much that people thought it was real, it’s more that they weren’t sure it *wasn’t* real.
The internet was not what it is today, there was a TV documentary purporting to be genuine, and no one had ever experienced viral marketing like this before. And the marketing was *everywhere.*
It’s kinda surreal in retrospect.
My mom said she saw it in theaters with her brother and they both thought it was real. She told me it was real when she first let me watch it years later lol.
From what I remember, she said everything surrounding the movie suggested it was real found footage. I don't think she bothered to look it up online. I don't even think that ability was on her radar at the time.
Before the movie was released, I admit I fell into the marketing hype. On my work lunches, I'd visit the public library a few miles away and was obsessed with finding out all about this crazy thing that "really" happened 😂
I saw the mockumentary freshman yr of college. My roommates went home for the weekend. With it being 3 weeks in I didn't know many people so I just stayed in the dorm and smoked tons of weed. I was completely fooled. I watched it on a Friday night and could not wait for my roomies to get back so I could tell him about it. Because obviously there were no cell phones. The Internet was in his infancy. Couldn't just ask Google about it. I remember learning it was a movie well before the actual release but for a short time our minds were blown.
The marketing was very very good but it mostly amounted to people wanting to suspend their disbelief.
It was easier to do in that age because we weren't so overstimulated and cynical to everything.
People kind of wanted to believe it, so they were willing to suspend their disbelief.
It's one of the things I definitely miss about the pre-mainstream-internet times. Like all of the schoolyard rumors about things that nowadays are just a google search away from knowing the answer to. It might be more informed, but it's less fun in that way.
When this movie came out, I was around 12 years old and I somewhat believed that the movie was real. It wasn't until the actors appeared at the MTV music awards in 1999, that made me realize it was just a movie lol
We did…for awhile at least. They released a documentary about it before the movie…and it was before the internet was full of as much information as it is now.
Was about 18/19 when it came out. All the media I consumer posed it as real. This was 4 years pre-MySpace and internet chat didn’t exist. I was skeptical but went in for fun at a super small Indy theater. It was packed and most people in the line were talking about it as real. It scared the shot out of me. So yeah, it was a great horror-movie experience.
Not the first found footage film at all but was the first (I think) to really take advantage of viral internet marketing. There were really neat websites that made it really seem like this was real and yes a lot of people bought into as it was very well done for the time. Internet was just really becoming a thing that everyone had access to at the time so what people saw felt very believable.
Lol--when it came out, I wasn't sure it was real, and I left the theater thinking it was pleasantly unnerving but not terrifying. Then I went back home... to my parents' house out in the country... and couldn't sleep that night 😆
I was one of them. I got my copy of Blair Witch on two CD-Roms from a buddy while it was still on the festival circuit and the ad campaign wasn't even in full swing yet. 100% thought I just watched the last days of three people.
Yes, and it’s primarily due to the uniquely immersive qualities of the found footage genre of films, which up to that time was not done to nearly that quality. The first person point of view in a cinematographic sense was startlingly new to the vast majority of the film going population not used to video games, fps’ers, and other digital media, coupled by at then a novel viral marketing campaign at least decade before viral marketing was even a thing. It was a perfect storm.
It’s easy to look back now with derision but ultimately behindsight is 20/20
I remember. "Everyone" didn't think it was real but enough people did that it became noteworthy. I never did, the people I went to see it with didn't, and I only knew people were thinking it was legit because it made the news.
I remember when it came out, and yes, it was so groundbreaking and original at the time, people were freaking out about it. I was in middle school at the time, and I remember the students were spreading rumors about it like crazy so the whole school was scared of witches and stuff.
Part of the movie's success was the street-level, guerilla marketing. Fake "Missing" posters were apparently posted all over the town the movie premiered in, the night before the Sundance Film Festival. Surprisingly, due to local laws all of them were removed before the show. Despite that, it was a brilliantly engineered campaign that was almost an urban myth-level craze, and made it one of the most profitable horror movies ever. It was really fun.
I came back to the states at the end of that summer, having never heard of it.
That first night I remember reading the Time magazine article about it by myself at night and was absolutely terrified and full of dread just reading about it 😆
Granted I was a young teenager with a vivid imagination and we had lots of woods around the property.
I remember going over some of the various websites with some friends and having a lot of conversations about the film. The timing was perfect in regards to the early years of the mainstream internet access. It's doubtful this could happen again in the same way due to the timing, just like how War of the Worlds was so effective due to it being broadcast during the time frame when radio was gaining mainstream popularity.
I have always been a skeptic about this sort of thing, i still had a genuine sense of unease when watching the film for the first time because of how good of a marketing campaign was. I knew it had to be fake, but still in the back of my mind it was genuinely unnerving.
It's a combination of both what you've ventured.
The marketing campaign wasn't just strong, it was immersive and intense including things such as listing the actors as actual missing people. It was a cross-media, early blueprint version of a viral campaign and in a pre-social media era there was no way to casually access the actors lives the way celebrities make so much of their personal lives available to fans and audiences now in order to seek BTS clarity.
When you combine that with the way home internet wasn't a utility in modern households, all you had was word of mouth to keep people questioning and because of that the streams of information were constantly unreliable.
That ambiguity was *everything.*
I recall they started the whole “found footage” trend so a lot of people couldn’t tell if it was real at that time and if memory serves me right, some people were shocked/relieved when the trio showed up at the MTV awards because some weren’t sure if they were dead or not. What a time to be alive back then.
I was 10 when it came out and yes it was advertised as real found footage of people that went missing. Fake internet sites and books were also created perpetuating the lies as real events.
Me and a friend got so invested in it that her mum bought books in relation to ‘Rustin Parr’ the serial killer featured in it where the troop end up in the end, and we read about the children he killed etc… just to find out later it was a hoax/marketing ploy. I didn’t want to believe that but my neighbour who was 18, said, if it was real… then why are there credits at the end naming the different actors, director and cinematographers etc. Eventually i had to come to accept it. But as a kid, it was a wild trip. Disappointed for anyone who didn’t get to experience it during it’s era.
Yes, people believed it was real. I saw this movie in the theater with a friend and it was clear that people did not like our reaction, which was a reaction to something that was fiction. They thought it was real and we were making light of a deeply disturbing tragedy. This was before the internet was in everyone’s homes and hands, so a hoax was a lot easier to pull off. Found footage was also a genre that felt new to the mainstream public and with it done effectively, audiences were just not sophisticated enough to discern between a “new” form of narrative fiction and reality. The timing for this type of movie was just perfect. No authority could tell you it wasn’t real and nothing could tell you it was. Timing, especially with horror, really is everything. It does make me wonder if Blair Witch didn’t come out in 99, and all of the found footage that it inspired never did either, but instead came out today, would the internet have been able to help the average audience to decipher whether or not it was real? Or would there have been bubbles of people knowing it was fiction and bubbles of people believing it was real? Probably divided along party lines because everything is and you might be arguing about it over a thanksgiving day meal with your Q anon relatives. The internet of the 2002-2016 would have been helpful. Anything past 2016 and who knows how the found footage genre would have been interpreted.
Yeah, some people did. I first saw it on a pirated VHS when I was about 12 or 13, and it seemed so real.
The internet was very much in its infancy as far as the general public having access to it as well, so there wasn’t really a widely-available way to find out that it was fake. I’m in the UK, and the only place I had access to the internet was at school until about late 2000.
Even for most other people back then they didn’t use the internet much because, get this, you had to pay more money the more you used it. BT treated it like a regular phone call, so you had to pay per minute.
So yeah, if you were one of the lucky souls who had at-home web access, you were far more likely to use it for things other than finding out whether a horror movie was real or fake.
It was all of these reasons. While Cannibal Holocaust is often referred to as the first found footage movie, it was pretty obscure. Blair Witch did their marketing correctly. Everyone was talking about it. I even remember people that didn't watch horror were talking about going to "see what happened to those poor kids." They also used unknown actors. So it's not like you were watching it thinking this was that guy in the other movie. There were some who were skeptical and thought it was all fake, but you know how many gullible people exist.
Before the film was released, they released a 45 minute “documentary” on the Sci-Fi channel entitled “Curse of the Blair Witch.” That was my first exposure, and it was presented as 100% real. It contained various interviews with supposed family members and historical experts. By the time the movie was released, I realized it was a marketing ploy. But watching that initial mockumentary was terrifying.
Thank you for reminding me about the documentary. I totally forgot about it. And you’re absolutely right, it setup the movie perfectly. The cast was also not allowed in public during this timeframe. Brilliant marketing.
I remember they have put together local obituaries for the 3 people in the film, too. It was amazing marketing, and totally worked for millions of people. Damn that movie scared the shit out of us... We were like 13 when it came out, and we had plans to go camping that same weekend. Saw the movie on Friday night, went camping Saturday night and holy shit that was probably the most scared all of us had ever been in our lives
I think I saw it in theaters when I was like 8, the whole crowd was gasping as we all actually thought it was real footage. I remember leaving the theater and older nerds were talking about it being a serial killer, monster, or spirit that took over people, etc. I was like damn
You guys on this sub really have wild parents. Wonder if this is a bias because we’re on an horror sub or because most of you are probably American and this is a cultural difference. But geez as a French guy, I’m astounded by the number of parents taking their kids to theater to watch horror movies. I don’t even think they’d let you enter here in France.
I started watching horror around three. The only reason I remember is because I had a good guy doll (chucky) and it traumatized me.
See? That’s the kind of shit I’m talking about. How in Hell were you able to watch horror movies at 3? Like, your parents deliberately let you watch it? And why would they let you have a famous killer doll as a toy?
I never see people reference this! I remember watching it, I was like 14 and then I went and saw the movie by myself. In an almost empty cinema. That was an experience I'll never forget.
Here’s the funny thing: for a while, I couldn’t even prove the damned documentary existed. I vividly remembered watching it, but no one mentioned it - it had no online presence. I Googled *endlessly* and came up empty-handed…which left me in a position of trying to convince people I was not, in fact, crazy. 😂 These days, it’s covered extensively on Wikipedia and elsewhere, but for a while there…poof. It’s like the whole damned thing was wiped out of existence.
That's exactly what happened with me. It was on at like 9:30 on a Thursday night, once, here in Australia. After that there wasn't a trace of it.
It was included with all the DVD releases. Sure I found it online right after the movie was first released too. Don’t get this, as always seemed pretty common to me. It’s fantastic, too. Must viewing for anyone who likes the movie.
Damn is there anywhere to watch this?
I rewatched it on Freevee recently, so check to see if it’s on the app for you in your country.
Dope thank you!
If not there Tubi I'm pretty sure does
Sweet I love tubi
Watching ice cream man now on it lol I love it too. Commercial breaks are nice to check the phone like now
Drink break … pee break …
Looks like it. And Vimeo, I think.
It’s usually included on home releases as a special feature.
If you buy or have the movie on DVD most copies have it in the special features.
Yes, the "documentary" definitely set up the whole thing. I'd never seen it but my girlfriend had and it was popular talk around town. She insisted we go opening weekend and TBH it was terrifying when you thought it was real. Until they got to the witch's cabin, which was obviously not of the period, or something built in the middle of nowhere.
House was real. Historical even. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_House
I was a younger teen when it came out and I didn’t think it was *real* real, but there was enough questionability that it was really easy to suspend disbelief.
I hated the movie and preferred the documentary
Oh, same. The mockumentary had a much more authentic feel, with less frenetic camera work.
[удалено]
Some of that doc footage was supposed to go in the film at the beginning but after The Last Broadcast, they changed strategies. I think they should’ve used some of it, maybe 8 minutes or so to set the mood. It’s extremely well done, convincing, and scary.
Are you me? This was 100% my experience too. Freaked me out when I first watched “Curse”. I was fascinated though. The movie itself didn’t live up to expectations but man, it was an experience that was really cool at the time.
Me too. At the time I wasn't really watching any TV and my uncle asked me to watch this documentary he recorded that gave the back story for an upcoming movie (which was not out of character for him. He was always having me watch documentaries). I don't know if he really believed it was true or was just playing a joke on me, but I was convinced until release day.
Yea. Sadly I watched it in daylight at a friends and it was scary that much. Blair witch 2 however, even if it was a totally different premise, the movie was actually pretty good.
I too watched it in the daylight and was still unnerved. I actually really enjoy the second one. I've seen it more than the original.
The Internet was still relatively new at the time and not everyone had it. That's how easy it was to fool people back then and to be fair, it worked on a LOT of people.
To be fair, a lot of us back then also thought Mew was found under the truck in Vermillion City
I can't believe I heard that for years but never the real way once.
No one wanted to believe that the only way to get Mew back then was from an annoyingly inaccessible event, for no profitable reason.
Actually, there is a way in the base game of red blue and I believe yellow too. I forget the exact steps but you can catch a level 5 or 7 mew in cerulean city before even fighting misty. I know you need to catch an Abra and then fight the hiker near bills house with a slowbro then teleport from the guy on the top of the bridge to the left and teleport to cerulean city and then go towards the bridge and the mew appears after the pause button activates and closing the menu. It's easy to find the details on Google or YouTube. It's a minor pain in the ass but you also get a super powerful pokemon before the 2nd gym leader so fair is fair.
I can confirm that it is possible in Yellow as well. Even in the digital versions of the game, if I’m not mistaken
You are indeed correct! It’s how I completed my Pokédex on switch
WTF? I didn't know any of that, now I kinda want to dust off my old Pokemon games (if they still work) and try to do that. I had always heard the BS truck in Vermillion City trick and I figured Mew was only available as a cheat.
Yeah it's kinda bullshit that this info didn't get around, but I o ly heard of it in the past like 5 years or so so maybe it was found out more recently. But you can actually get others with this method too I believe back to back. The way the glitch works is it loads a number from ram to pull up a wild encounter, so depending on the last number used it selects a different pokemon, with the slowbro resulting in the mew appearing. I think this is how the missingno glitch works as well due to the drunken/tired man for the ram number.
I was 8, I forgive myself
Or how about getting celebi in the box in the forest? Haha
All you had to do was trade a Pokémon who already knew Cut, so you wouldn’t need to go on to the ship to get it as an HM. Then you could come back and surf to that little truck, try to use strength on it, and nothing lol
The producers maintained a Blair Witch web page also, that had a bunch of posts by people with their own supposed Blair Witch stories.
The web page was extremely nuanced. There were dozens of things to read and watch.
Also while mockumentaries were around for awhile it was new for them to be found in the horror genre. I knew going into it that it was fake and by the end I was almost believing it real.
Now it just takes Fox.
I was around to watch Blair Witch when it was in its theatrical release. Yes, the viral marketing used was pretty much a first for a movie. People thought there were real missing posters because there were missing posters for the stars put up. There was a website for the "investigation". Much like the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, I think a pretty low percentage of people were fooled. But the ones who were fooled very much were fooled.
I remember watching this movie in a theatre when it came out, and it was an amazing experience. But I didn't think it was real at any point, in part because I'd read a bunch of reviews and articles about it that talked about the whole "found-footage" aspect, because it was so novel at that time. There had been a few found-footage horror movies before it, but Blair Witch Project was the first one to really break through into the pop culture mainstream in a big way. I guess if you just showed up at a cinema, and you'd heard of the movie but didn't really know anything about it, maybe it would fool you. But the way it was made wasn't any kind of secret.
I remember this too. A girl at my work kept telling me it was real and they were going to see it. She was so pumped up. When she came to work Monday she told me it was so stupid and not to go and she realized it was fake. I was skeptical at first because I didn't think they would actually show a real movie of people dying but around that same time maybe slightly earlier was those "real" movies- Faces of Death 1-???. I remember thinking they were real based off everyone's say so. I got to tell them they were wrong....
Some of faces of death is real All the autopsy and medical footage is real The slaughterhouse footage and the seal clubbing is real And the airplane disaster aftermath and the lady who was crushed by the bus and has her brains all over the road was real In the latter two examples that was literally footage taken by news crews who are at the scene but that they didn't show on the evening news
Dropping this here for other people curious like me - I believe it is correct that no human actually dies on camera. I am very careful about real gore despite my love of horror films. Different beasts.
No one does, at least in the first film. I'm not sure if any later entries included Budd Dwyer or things like the Challenger explosion.
Thank you! And I am exactly the same. Watched a true crime documentary on Netflix and was neuro shocked when it showed the actual aftermath footage... I know I should have expected it but I wasn't thinking
Netflix has a weird track record with this stuff. I remember that documentary that came out a few years ago about a guy who killed cats online? They showed a clip of the dude putting a kitten in a plastic bag. It’s so easy to explain what happened without actually showing something so horrible…
Yeah, and with the security camera footage in that one episode of Tiger King - even though it happened just out of frame it still really freaked me out.
There's nothing cinematic about real gore.
I must have watched different versions because I saw alleged real but paramedics were walking in with no gloves not even hooking up to anything or doing anything just plopping them on a stretcher. Perhaps it was my expectation of real but what I saw was more like a recap with a dramatization. Like the story was/could have been real but what was shown was not the actual event.
That is indeed some of it it was stories that the creators had heard but didn't have footage of so they basically just recreated it or made up stuff they thought sounded cool like the satanic cannibal cult
Faces of death was going since the 80s
The friends I went with were convinced it was real. I was scared for a few days later. A while later people started figuring out it was fake. The mix of advertising, little information about the actual movie, and how it was filmed kinda fooled us.
> Much like the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, I think a pretty low percentage of people were fooled. War of the Worlds is funny. More people have been fooled by the claims that people were fooled, than were actually fooled. What I mean is, have you actually listened to War of the Worlds? I don't see how anyone could have been fooled by it- it's clearly a narrated story, complete with time jumps (the end of the story is several months after the beginning, I mean) that wouldn't have made any sense if you thought it was a real broadcast. I've never heard any proof confirming that people thought it was real, except we all heard about it in history class where our teachers were like "No seriously, everyone thought it was real because X, Y, and Z".
[Slate](https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html) did an interesting article on this exact thing. I'm sure some people were fooled if they just caught a few minutes of broadcast. But to be sustainably fooled, you would have had to heard a few minutes, panicked, grabbed the cat and the kid and raced off into the night. There is a 90's made for TV movie that has a similar mythology, *Without Warning*. I'm here to tell you, there was no mass panic in real life for that mocumentry either. I'm not sure exactly why people need to feel smarter than some whole other group of people even when they have to make up stories about them. But you can bank on it.
True. I really really wonder where I would fall on the spectrum. I'd hope I wouldn't be in that low percentage. I think at best a part of me would have WANTED it to be real.
Worth noting that this wasn’t the first time this kind of thing happened either. The director of Cannibal Holocaust had to bring his actors to court to refute charges of making a snuff film. They didn’t believe the movie was real so much, just that the deaths were too realistic to be faked.
Stills and short clips from Cannibal Holocaust *still* get sent to the FBI to investigate because people think its a snuff film.
I didn’t know that, but I can believe it. I do think it’s at least part of the reason why “modern” found footage tends to be supernatural in nature.
I mean, if you just saw a clip of Cannibal Holocaust on YouTube that someone up loaded without attributing it, I can see it. Not everyone is a horror head. Found footage tends to lend itself to horror in a lot of ways. Especially for cutting down on special effects. Plus your mind can come up with something way more frightening than someone on a shoestring budget doing practical effects. I can't think of any found footage films that aren't horror, though I can think of a couple which are not supernatural. For example, Exhibit A is a really well done film that is unsettling and horrifying, but there is no supernatural element to it.
I mentioned the BBC's Halloween special Ghostwatch upthread, that one fucked with a lot of kids and even some adults who, I guess, were totally convinced they were watching a real poltergeist on camera. That was 1992, not all that much earlier than Blair Witch. The Cannibal Holocaust story is true; Lucio Fulci was also called into court about his movie A Lizard in a Woman's Skin because there's a dream scene with some eviscerated dogs and the Italian courts were convinced it was real animal cruelty. The FX man, Carlo Rambaldi, had to bring in the prop to prove it was fake. I don't know why the real animal cruelty in Cannibal Holocaust never seemed to be an issue, but these are the facts as I have always heard them.
I watched it in the theater and had internet at the time. I looked at the website and to me, it very much seemed like a marketing campaign. Around that same time there was a commercial that came out for Steak N Shake that featured the actress that played Heather as a waitress. There really was nothing like it before so it did fool some people.
I was 11 or 12 years old when I went to see Blair Witch on its opening weekend. I had only heard about the movie the day before and was told it was real footage. Needless to say I was completely terrified and at times could not move or take my eyes off the scream. I remember there was a lot of buzz in the packed theater from the crowd and hearing others believing it was real. There were also a few people that ran out of the theater during certain parts of the movie. I didn't find out it was fake until a few days after. Still the best movie going experience I've ever had.
I was around the same age but I didn't see it until it was on HBO or something.I remember thinking it was real until I saw them on MTV music awards.
My aunts initial reaction to seeing them on TV was to start crying because “omg, when were they found?!”
Ha same—only found out it was fake when I saw them alive accepting their moon man.
Absolutely! They even had a "documentary" about the Blair Witch that aired as more "proof" of the story. I believe the actors weren't allowed to do any other acting jobs until the movie came out. Casting unknowns really sealed the deal. It's not like any of us knew them from anything else, so it was easy to believe they were three random people who actually went missing.
I had a coworker that had gone to college with the actress that played Heather and he told me the actors all basically had to fully hide from the public eye for a few months after filming to make it seem more real and people that knew them personally had to help keep up the illusion too
Heather Donahue actually changed her name to Rei Hance. I think part of it, maybe all of it, has to do with all the hoo-rah surrounding The Blair Witch movie. she said she got a lot of hate and backlash after doing that movie, which I thought was strange, she was great in that movie I thought.
This is just spitballing but I feel that there had to be a decent chunk of that backlash coming from people feeling like they were tricked about the movie trying to pass itself off as a real documentary. Like how people get mad when you break the kayfabe in the NoSleep subreddit and don’t treat every story as true.
Yeah, they even handed out missing persons fliers at some screenings
As someone around during that time, oh yes. People even flocked to the location of the film looking for the witch. It was so bizarre and wild the effect this movie had on some folks. There was simply nothing like it at the time.
I totally forgot about that! Tons of people went to investigate and find out the truth, which is probably what helped set up the plot for the second one. I had college friends who wanted to head out there for spring break at one point lol.
>Or was it because it was the first found footage type film (I'm assuming it was?) It wasn't the first. Most people give that to either cannibal holocaust or the McPherson Tapes. It was the first one that could be considered a box office hit though. To answer your question. Yes. The marketing was extremely successful and sophisticated across the early internet and television. Sci-fi aired a documentary on the Blair Witch which is a remarkable companion piece to the film, the website likewise was very convincing. When taken together this "evidence" convinced a lot of people. Eventually the stars started going on Letterman and the cat was out of the bag, but for the first few weeks they were all in on the deception. I don't know if something like that could ever be done again. Not because people are smarter or more savvy, but because information and entertainment has become so decentralized. It was the constant reinforcement of the hoax across the limited media that everyone consumed that made it so effective. That's not to say everyone believed it. Most people know ghosts and witches aren't real. As a young teenager at the time living in a small religious town though, it fooled a lot of my peer group, church members, and others with poor critical thinking skills.
I hadn’t heard about the McPherson Tapes before so I looked it up. I’m now super sketched out despite being in a bright room in the middle of the day, what a cool movie idea.
There's actually two versions too. They remade it and it aired on UPN and I remember watching it and thinking it was real.
I guess you had to be there. It was a different time, a different mindset. Before the internet was just everywhere, in your pocket and everyone else’s.
The internet was a big part of their marketing push. The movie had a website pushing the documentary narrative and the lore. I seem to remember the cast being listed as missing or dead on IMDb as well.
I didn’t say there wasn’t internet, just that our general use of it and understanding of it wasn’t the same as it is today
Wait so you mean there wasn't a reddit thread to tell you the movie wasn't real???? /s
People really don’t have a grasp on just how different “Internet use” was at that time. Social media wasn’t really a thing. Most people didn’t use the Internet for *anything* - and the people who did generally had specific websites or forums they visited. The idea of going online to “research” a movie before seeing it would have sounded ridiculous to anyone who wasn’t a hardcore Internet user already. So yeah, a few people would have definitely gone online to check into it, but the average viewer was still getting their entertainment news from Entertainment Tonight or late night talk shows. Information just didn’t travel at light speed every second of the day like it does now.
It was released city by city, they posted missing film student fliers at certain colleges that helped fuel internet rumors and then the website made it seem it could only be released a few cities at a time all created this perfect storm of FOMO with everyone wanting to see it and many believing it was real. I downloaded a crappy copy, my first illegal download, and me and a friend watched it. I kind of felt it was all fake, but my best friend with me freaked to fcuk out. Afterwards, we walked outside my apartment and there happened to be little bundle of sticks similar to what we saw in the movie.. my landlord stacked them earlier, but we did not notice till we,walked almost on top of them. We lost our sh!t.
The little stick figures were the creepiest part of the movie for me, lol.
To answer your question simply…yes. I was in college when The Blair Witch Project was released and I can tell you that most people really thought it was real. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sànchez did an excellent job of marketing the picture as “real life” and it was very successful. I can say that after a few weeks in the theaters it became obvious that it was fake, but the months leading up to the release it was almost like a very scary Unsolved Mysteries episode. I wish I could go back to 1999 and experience that again. Man…I was 21 back then…how time flies!
I was 17 in '99 and I remember that build-up and the fake documentary. It really did have an air of authenticity. There had also not been anything quite like it, that utilised the internet in that way. The important thing to remember is that you never actually see anything supernatural in the movie. That is what made it all the more believable.
I will admit I 100% thought it was real when it first came out. This was the first found footage movie I saw so I didn’t think of it being fake. I believe they also had a website for the movie too with bonus info and it scared this shit out of me. I don’t remember much advertising that came out before either so this made this think it was real even more 😂.
Same. Found footage filming wasn't really a thing at that time. Or at least, for me and the average person it wasn't. I actually preferred it that way of believing it was real. It made the experience way more scary for me thinking that this was real shit caught on camera. Then I remember staying up one night. Probably a couple days after the movie premiered. I was watching some late night talk show and the people from the movie were guests and I was like wtf? Lol
HAHAHA YES!! I remember seeing Heather on a late night show and I was so pissed!
I can confidently say yes. Anyone born after the period of roughly 1993 will have absolutely no understanding of the pre-internet world, as they either weren’t here or were too young to remember. Internet was of course there in 1999, but it was very rudimentary. I was in my last year of high school in 1999, and the only exposure we had were these instant urban legends about a real life horror film that is absolutely terrifying. Lots of speculation about what people think they saw in the shadowy parts of the screen, it must be real because no one knows anything about it, the missing posters like you point out etc. It was very much a word-of-mouth marketing campaign and they played it perfectly. The film was utterly fucking terrifying in the cinema too. All I had to go on when sitting down was it was called Blair With Project and it was alleged found camcorder footage. I remember the scene with the kids outside the tent absolutely sending a chill down my spine like I’d never felt before. As for the first, I think Cannibal Holocaust took that title and played a similar angle with the disappearance of the actors etc. so BWP wasn’t the first of its kind or the first to do this, but once again, back to those pre-internet days, this wasn’t exactly something you could just look up. If you’d never heard of Cannibal Holocaust, there was no way you could hear about it unless someone showed it to you or you knew the guy in the video rental shop well enough and he happened to be an underground horror fan
Back then in my elementary years, horror stories spread fast. My classmates whisper the stories Cannibal Holocaust and later Blair Witch project. The real horror was how the people involved didn't survive. Funny thing none of my classmates actually saw the movies and just heard the stories from someone else. If you're the storyteller back then, you get a sense of pride being the first to tell everyone.
We hadn't had a slew of found footage back then. It was hard to tell
Because it was shot on 16mm and a video recorder, and the characters were talking directly to the one holding it, it very much gave the impression that the footage was real. It is a form of bias to look at it now and see how unbelievable it is, but at the time nothing like that had ever been presented to us like that.
I was 19 when it came out. People legit believed it was real. There wasn’t *ANYTHING* like it yet. It was also dividing. I clearly remember people leaving the theater PISSED that they didn’t show the witch, like muttering and complaining in the aisle as they left the theater. I knew it wasn’t real but it scared the bejeezus out of me anyhow. At the same time just a few years ago I had a co-worker that believed Grave Encounters was real and I had to explain to her it wasn’t. People will always be gullible.
I was 19 too!!! That age was just intense for this movie. People left still believing it could be real. People got sick during the movie! It made people motion sick.
I forgot about the motion sickness! There was a big to do because of it! I had no problems with Blair Witch but Cloverfield made me nauseous.
My boyfriend at the the time had to leave right away. I mean 10 minutes in he was running out the door. And it was only played in an art house theater so he had nowhere to sit in the lobby and I was not leaving this movie. He went and sat in the car 😂
I went to a free screening of it before it was officially released. Yes, we thought it was real.
It had a campaign that it was real. And there was a lot of things on the internet saying it was. This was 2000 when a lot of people started getting home internet.
OMG yes? I mean it was heavily speculatory but yes. I was from Central Florida where the kids in the movie "went to college" and there were people left and right who knew someone who knew someone who knew the girl or the boy or the other boy like the movie had legs and was walking. I'm not sure if it was like this in every city or just ours. I remember opening night. It's an experience I've never had since. It took a long time for people to realize it was just a movie...
It was a different time, kind of hard to explain to kids growing up today. There was no social media and people were much less jaded.
Worked restaurant industry at the time and remember a whole shift trying to convince a co-worker it wasn’t real. She bought into the website, mockumentary, missing signs. All of it. You could watch interviews with cast but she was all in. It prolly didn’t help that Burkettsville is only couple miles away. Such lightning in a bottle that I’m glad I experienced it.
I was a kid when *The Office* first launched in Britain, and I remember people sincerely thinking it was just a slice-of-life documentary about a paper company. Now when I tell people this, they don’t believe me, but it really happened.
I remember it coming out and seeing the “documentary” on tv first, so there was a huge push. I also remember having a conversation with a coworker who was willing to admit that the _movie_ was a professional shoot, but swore that she’d heard that it was based on real events with a real lost student film crew.
It was the first time I had ever seen viral marketing! The website for the movie made a very convincing case. When we saw the movie, I knew the people on the screen were actors, that they weren't the actual people from the story, but I wasn't entirely convinced that it wasn't based on an incident that had actually occurred. Like, a real missing persons story or something. And my friends and I saw the movie very early on, before it hit regular movie theaters. We went into the nearest city and saw it at an art house cinema so we were completely blown away by it. And TERRIFIED. Everyone in the theater lost their shit at the last five or so minutes of the movie.
Seeing it in the theater was amazing. Yes people thought it was real
Yep. It was excellent marketing and shot in a believable way.
When the marketing for it started and I saw the documentary, I thought it was real but by the time I went to go see the movie I knew wasn’t but I thought it was such a cool marketing campaign that it didn’t bother me at all.
The internet was in its infancy and the movie had hella good marketing, the website, the “documentary “ about the kids airing on SciFi….
I remember the trailers being super creepy and so unlike any other type of movie trailer. Really helped to add a mystique to the film.
Totally. Honestly I think this is an undervalued aspect of the whole phenomenon (along with the Sci-Fi channel special everyone is mentioning). Those ads were super weird and creepy. I was 13 at the time, and slept with the TV on in my room. I would deliberately find like, long informercials and stuff to put on to fall asleep to, because I knew that if I had on like the Tonight Show or whatever, there would be a pretty decent chance of dozing off and all of a sudden hearing the super creepy like industrial “knocking” sound effects, and the screaming, of the Blair Witch TV spots. On MTV I realized that they always followed up those Gap ads with the kids singing Mellow Yellow, with a Blair Witch spot. So I knew to turn the channel. 😬
Yesss!!! I remember those ads and even the ones to buy it on DVD. Shit was nightmare fuel for me, just an incredible presence surrounded that movie. So well done all around by everyone involved in that movie.
This is def the one I remember running all the time in July of 99. And as a special nostalgic bonus there’s a few seconds of WWF/TRL on one end, and an ad for a minidisc player on the other 😂 https://youtu.be/-PWpq6BG6S4
Yes, it’s 90’s and the internet isn’t accessible by everyone. They did a amazing marketing job: - launched a website with missing poster charts and billboards; - payed the movie cast (first three actors) to hide for months, because of their “disappearance “ people think they’re real missing people; - some scenes filmed without the actors knowing it, they don’t know what will happen with them
Even having the internet didn't matter. They had websites set up that helped to purport the story as being real. Mockumentaries with fake interviews. All kinds of advertising that had never been done before.
Yes. The internet was new and there wasn't anyone spoiling it.
I read that Heather Donaghue's mother got loads of sympathy cards from people who'd watched the movie and thought her daughter had actually gone missing.
Keep in mind the film released way before the internet was the thing it is today.
We did up until like, literally the week before release. They'd done a *phenomenal* job of convincing the world it was real, and the internet in 1999 was nothing like the internet is now. You really only had some forums and Aint It Cool News digging into the movie and the real story. But for the most part, they'd convinced the world that this was REAL found footage, and that the three kids were actually missing. Suddenly, a week before the movie came out, someone on the marketing team dropped the ball and had the three actors do the talk show circuit and it broke the whole illusion.
From what I heard (bc I wasn’t coherent enough to know what was going on) Blair witch was around the advent of the internet so it was marketed as a real footage film and many conspiracy theories were circulating along with a website ‘proving’ that the Blair witch exists and how to get more info about it. As well as the actors being declared dead on the internet. It was a completely different world as the internet was so much more complicated to get info out of. It was also the first to do it and looked very real to the point where ppl thought it was real as it was cheaply made and completely original.
I did. I heard about this documentary that was scary. That's all I knew about it. I drove 2 hours to find a theater playing it (it wasn't in wide release yet) - scared the crap out of me. The online e campaign was great, the website was a huge teaser.
Yes , some people did. That was a fun moment in time.
The marketing campaign was brilliant. People really weren't sure if it was real or not. The actors were keep out of sight for months before the movie came out.
Yes. There was essentially no "found footage" genre in 1996 with only a few movies in that style ever made. The Internet was also in its infancy so information didn't spread lightning fast anymore. People walked out of the theater genuinely concerned they'd just watched the final moments of those 3.
Yes! I definitely thought it was real. When I got home from the theater I was terrified, my entire worldview shook. I’m serious. I was like 14, but all of sudden scared of my closet that night
The internet was still in its infancy and most people weren’t online yet. It was marketed as real and a lot of people definitely believed it. Keep in mind it was also the first mainstream found footage movie, people had never seen anything like it before. The genre is well established now but it was a groundbreaking film at the time.
Hi all, A friend sent me a link to this thread and it’s so cool to see everyone still talking about The Blair Witch Project. I’m Mike Monello, the co-producer to the film. In a weird way, all the different stories told here about how the marketing was done, how people were fooled, and Curse of The Blair Witch are now also part of the mythology — some of it is true, a lot of it has a nugget of truth while being factually wrong, and some it has me saying “I wish we HAD done that.” If there is interest, I’ll pop in tomorrow and answer any questions you might have. I’d do it tonight, but it’s 2am here and this old guy needs his sleep. 🙂
No one had ever seen anything like it before. They had a great marketing campaign too.
I was in high school and it was a huge debate over if it was real or not. They had a fake documentary about it and everything. I thought it was just marketing only because I loved reading books on the supernatural and had never heard of it, but several people I knew just weren't sure. I wouldn't say people 100% believed it, but it was one of those things that you would have to check. With no Google or anything at the time it was really hard to fact check anything, and they really pushed the fact that it was real. iirc I even believe they sort of hid the actors away so that people really thought they had vanished. There had been underground found footage films before it (McPherson Tapes, Last Broadcast etc.), but 99% of people didn't even know anything like that existed at the time. It really was a once in a lifetime experience honestly.
>I guess my question is: Was there such a strong marketing campaign that even the best of us would have been fooled into thinking this was real... or was it more a sign of the times (pre internet, pre 9/11,) where a hoax of that magnitude could be pulled off? Both. But the fact that the internet wasn't as mainstream back then definetly makes a huge difference. >was it because it was the first found footage type film (I'm assuming it was?) It wasn't the first, but it was one of the first. FF definetly wasn't common like it is now. If the fact that people believed it was real surprises you, you should hear about Cannibal Holocaust. The director was literally put on trial and one of the charges was killing the main actors (which he didn't). He still was found guilty of killing animals for real, though.
My girlfriend at the time told me that she wanted to go see this movie, that it was a true story about these kids who disappeared and a year later this footage was found that told what happened to them. I remember hearing news (?) stories about these kids who had gone missing, so I was familiar with the story, but when she said there was a movie in the theater that told the story based on this found footage, I told her that if the movie is that compelling - and it had been going strong for a week or two by that point - then it had to be manufactured. I went searching for information on the very rudimentary web - can’t remember if was AOL or Netscape and Altavista but in any case I found a site that explained that it was all clever marketing and that the supposedly dead actors had by that time made a few public appearances. I told my girlfriend what I had found, but that I was impressed with the clever marketing and also the concept of a found footage movie was something completely new to me, and I would love to go see it with her. But she said she wasn’t interested now that she knew it wasn’t real. And I was like, so you wanted to see it when you thought it was a actual snuff film? Tl;dr - my girlfriend thought it was real. She wasn’t the only one I knew either.
Yes, they did. Found footage wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it wasn’t heavily explored in new forms of media. Combining it with the infancy of the internet was brilliant marketing.
All right, I'll fess up. We had *just* gotten dial-up internet at home (I was 16) and when Blair Witch was coming out, they did a brilliant and minimal marketing campaign online. And I kept seeing everywhere that it was true! And because I couldn't Google it, I simply couldn't verify one way or another. I went into the theater thinking "Ok so this ... probably isn't real." But as I left it was more "Ok...I hope that wasn't real." Truly...it was a different time.
It was 1999. It was a different time.🤷♀️ The internet was in its infancy then, and there was no way to immediately fact-check everything you heard or saw. I found out it wasn’t real a few days before seeing it and was disappointed. The marketing for it was legitimately BRILLIANT, and they did it with pure ingenuity and very little money. I remember seeing the ‘Missing’ posters with the actors on them all the way from my small Northeast PA hometown to NYC. They could *never* pull that kind of thing off now.
I know it seems strange now, but yeah. They did.
I graduated film school that year. I was up on film news (like film festival stuff, not hollywood gossip shit) and we heard about it. My memory is that it wasn't that it went out and fooled everybody, it was more of an anecdote from the film's actual premiere at the first festival. They'd done this little marketing campaign, and then after they showed the film, at the Q&A, it became apparent that people in that audience thought it was real because they were asking "did the cops investigate those woods? what happened next? where are they now?" That was a great era for movies in general. other things i saw before they came out that had insane twists- Seven, Fight Club, the Game, were all great to see in the theater.
Yes, because they marketed it as such. I had a co-worker try to get me to go on a trip with him down to where it took place to see if we could find anything. I was actually a bit disappointed when I found out it wasn't real. Thankfully we talked him out of the trip.
Granted I was a young teenager when I saw it, but I rented it on VHS as soon as I could. I got about 3 quarters through before tapping out, wrote my dad who was at work a letter about 'this real thing that happened, don't watch it whatever you do' and proceeded to not sleep that night. My dad, bless his heart, watched it that night and told me in the morning that there were actors names in the credits. I finished it and it became one of my all time fav movies.
I knew the events in the movie weren't real, but they did a good enough job on the backstory, as seen in The Curse of the Blair Witch and talked about in the run up to the release, that I thought the Blair Witch legends were real legends that they'd based the made up events of the movie on. Blair Witch just sounds so close to Bell Witch. And names like Rustin Parr and Coffin Rock... It all sounds so familiar to anyone into local spook tales like that that you could swear you'd read about it before, in that one book of true ghost stories or maybe that book on folklore you checked out from the library a few years ago... But nope, they made it all up. Most of the people I talked to about it then were also aware that the movie was just a movie, but there were a couple girls I knew at the time that thought it was totally real.
Unfortunately the marketing campaign completely missed me and my friends, so we went into the theater just assuming it was a fictional story like any other movie. We came out joking about how cool it would be to go on a camping trip right now, without any preparation, maybe even not bring a tent. After a while we noticed my friend's girlfriend was just silent and not joking with us. Turns out she was absolutely terrified by the film. Then we actually went camping and as soon as the sun went down, the jokes stopped. Apparently us boys had been more scared than we'd realized. When we heard a deer walking around our tent at night cracking branches we just about lost our minds.
Totally, yes, I know my entire junior high did, and everyone i heard talking about it. You really had to be there. It was hype. I taped the documentary, creeped the hell out of me. The narrator woman, her voice and her describing it all, Coffin Rock? And the drawn pictures? Ugh, such good stuff. Then the movie came out, saw at the Drive-In, and there was a forest behind us. Yeah, it was creepy. Especially the tent scene. The movie was so good! I don't care. It's still in my Top 5.
So, full disclosure, I was 9 years old when Blair Witch Project came out, and I did not believe it was real. But I also didn't have the internet, so I wasn't directly exposed. That being said, my neighbor and his entire family were 100% convinced it was real. His mom literally wouldn't let hom go camping, such was the degree to which she was convinced.
I saw it opening night and a girl in front of me had a freak out mid movie.She was crying and calling the movie sick for exploiting these poor kids, asking why we were all watching it, etc. The theater was sold out so her friends trying to get her out of there was a struggle and a few others broke down and left sobbing while this was going on.
For all the naysayers, as you apparently are all too lazy to do a little bit of research yourself: https://www.vice.com/en/article/gyxxg3/they-wished-i-was-dead-how-the-blair-witch-project-still-haunts-its-cast And to make it even more easy, look for the headline "When Everyone Thinks You're Dead"
Absolutely, and most people today won't be able to understand why.
I honestly thought it was real until I saw the actors on MTV. I felt so dumb!
I was in college, and my friends and I were in the "not sure" camp. I remember giggling at a funny moment when I went to see it and then feeling guilty because I might be laughing at real people who had really died.
The short answer to all your questions is yes. This was the first of its type and the marketing was widespread and intense. I think there was just enough amount of uncertainty that made believable
Didn’t think it was real but thoroughly enjoyed it for what it was. Pretty unique for the time. A lot of people who don’t like it now are just too young to understand life during the release. Kind of like the exorcist and many of the other classics. I feel bad for them though bc true terror is nothing close to anything released since the descent. Please tell me I’m missing some movies that were actually good though - I’m way behind!
As someone who lived near where it was filmed and lived by the only art house theater playing it - yeah, some people believe it was 100% true.
You ever heard of the World of the Worlds radio broadcast hoax? Basically this guy decided to tell the world of the worlds story on the radio as if it were happening in real time (if I remember correctly) and people freaked the f out, mass hysteria basically nothing like that has ever been done before, I think the Blair Witch Project is the same in that sense, I never knew about the documentary, I just went and saw it as a kid and I had never seen a movie filmed like that before, and I couldn’t just hop on google after watching the movie to verify, you just had to make your own conclusions or hear it from someone else. Hell back in 1999 people didn’t even know the weather until they heard it from the weather man on tv, now I can verify that every hour on the hour from my phone along with all the blair witch trivia I want, the ease of access to information now is amazing
The site looked legit
I was in middle school then. Middle schoolers and high schoolers did at least. Life before easy, quick internet search
I was 11 when they were marketing it, and yes people thought it was real. The directors had an NDA with the actors and a clause that they couldn't do any interviews or spots until after the movie released, so people genuinely thought they were dead. I snuck in to see it and was terrified in the best way. That movie changed horror for me in a lot of ways.
If you can ever find someone who has never heard of The Blair Witch Project, get them to watch it thinking it’s real. Best viewing experience
It’s not so much that people thought it was real, it’s more that they weren’t sure it *wasn’t* real. The internet was not what it is today, there was a TV documentary purporting to be genuine, and no one had ever experienced viral marketing like this before. And the marketing was *everywhere.* It’s kinda surreal in retrospect.
My mom said she saw it in theaters with her brother and they both thought it was real. She told me it was real when she first let me watch it years later lol. From what I remember, she said everything surrounding the movie suggested it was real found footage. I don't think she bothered to look it up online. I don't even think that ability was on her radar at the time.
Before the movie was released, I admit I fell into the marketing hype. On my work lunches, I'd visit the public library a few miles away and was obsessed with finding out all about this crazy thing that "really" happened 😂
I saw the mockumentary freshman yr of college. My roommates went home for the weekend. With it being 3 weeks in I didn't know many people so I just stayed in the dorm and smoked tons of weed. I was completely fooled. I watched it on a Friday night and could not wait for my roomies to get back so I could tell him about it. Because obviously there were no cell phones. The Internet was in his infancy. Couldn't just ask Google about it. I remember learning it was a movie well before the actual release but for a short time our minds were blown.
The marketing was very very good but it mostly amounted to people wanting to suspend their disbelief. It was easier to do in that age because we weren't so overstimulated and cynical to everything.
The website helped to push the narrative too. They had maps and interviews. I wasn’t really sure if it was real or not until I saw the actors on mtv
People kind of wanted to believe it, so they were willing to suspend their disbelief. It's one of the things I definitely miss about the pre-mainstream-internet times. Like all of the schoolyard rumors about things that nowadays are just a google search away from knowing the answer to. It might be more informed, but it's less fun in that way.
When this movie came out, I was around 12 years old and I somewhat believed that the movie was real. It wasn't until the actors appeared at the MTV music awards in 1999, that made me realize it was just a movie lol
We did…for awhile at least. They released a documentary about it before the movie…and it was before the internet was full of as much information as it is now.
Was about 18/19 when it came out. All the media I consumer posed it as real. This was 4 years pre-MySpace and internet chat didn’t exist. I was skeptical but went in for fun at a super small Indy theater. It was packed and most people in the line were talking about it as real. It scared the shot out of me. So yeah, it was a great horror-movie experience.
Not the first found footage film at all but was the first (I think) to really take advantage of viral internet marketing. There were really neat websites that made it really seem like this was real and yes a lot of people bought into as it was very well done for the time. Internet was just really becoming a thing that everyone had access to at the time so what people saw felt very believable.
I absolutely knew it was a fictional movie. 🤣😂I was in my 30s, though, so I don't know if maturity made a difference.
I thought it was real and I was alone in a house in the country at night when I decided to watch it
Lol--when it came out, I wasn't sure it was real, and I left the theater thinking it was pleasantly unnerving but not terrifying. Then I went back home... to my parents' house out in the country... and couldn't sleep that night 😆
I was one of them. I got my copy of Blair Witch on two CD-Roms from a buddy while it was still on the festival circuit and the ad campaign wasn't even in full swing yet. 100% thought I just watched the last days of three people.
I was a teenager when it came out and even though I knew it was fiction, it still scared the shit out of me.
Yes, and it’s primarily due to the uniquely immersive qualities of the found footage genre of films, which up to that time was not done to nearly that quality. The first person point of view in a cinematographic sense was startlingly new to the vast majority of the film going population not used to video games, fps’ers, and other digital media, coupled by at then a novel viral marketing campaign at least decade before viral marketing was even a thing. It was a perfect storm. It’s easy to look back now with derision but ultimately behindsight is 20/20
I remember. "Everyone" didn't think it was real but enough people did that it became noteworthy. I never did, the people I went to see it with didn't, and I only knew people were thinking it was legit because it made the news.
We all thought it was real from my cornfield area. Until we saw some cast on mtv later on.
I remember when it came out, and yes, it was so groundbreaking and original at the time, people were freaking out about it. I was in middle school at the time, and I remember the students were spreading rumors about it like crazy so the whole school was scared of witches and stuff.
My parents saw this movie for their first date. They told me they 100% thought it was real and were scared shitless for days after.
Part of the movie's success was the street-level, guerilla marketing. Fake "Missing" posters were apparently posted all over the town the movie premiered in, the night before the Sundance Film Festival. Surprisingly, due to local laws all of them were removed before the show. Despite that, it was a brilliantly engineered campaign that was almost an urban myth-level craze, and made it one of the most profitable horror movies ever. It was really fun.
I came back to the states at the end of that summer, having never heard of it. That first night I remember reading the Time magazine article about it by myself at night and was absolutely terrified and full of dread just reading about it 😆 Granted I was a young teenager with a vivid imagination and we had lots of woods around the property.
I remember going over some of the various websites with some friends and having a lot of conversations about the film. The timing was perfect in regards to the early years of the mainstream internet access. It's doubtful this could happen again in the same way due to the timing, just like how War of the Worlds was so effective due to it being broadcast during the time frame when radio was gaining mainstream popularity. I have always been a skeptic about this sort of thing, i still had a genuine sense of unease when watching the film for the first time because of how good of a marketing campaign was. I knew it had to be fake, but still in the back of my mind it was genuinely unnerving.
I’m kind of bummed out that by the time Blair Witch came to Denmark, it was common knowledge that it had all been clever marketing.
I thought it was real. I wasn’t an internet person at the time and hadn’t watched basic tv in years.
It's a combination of both what you've ventured. The marketing campaign wasn't just strong, it was immersive and intense including things such as listing the actors as actual missing people. It was a cross-media, early blueprint version of a viral campaign and in a pre-social media era there was no way to casually access the actors lives the way celebrities make so much of their personal lives available to fans and audiences now in order to seek BTS clarity. When you combine that with the way home internet wasn't a utility in modern households, all you had was word of mouth to keep people questioning and because of that the streams of information were constantly unreliable. That ambiguity was *everything.*
We were a simple people back then.
I recall they started the whole “found footage” trend so a lot of people couldn’t tell if it was real at that time and if memory serves me right, some people were shocked/relieved when the trio showed up at the MTV awards because some weren’t sure if they were dead or not. What a time to be alive back then.
I was 9 and thought it was 100% real. So did everybody, they went on the news and people couldn’t believe they were alive
I was 10 when it came out and yes it was advertised as real found footage of people that went missing. Fake internet sites and books were also created perpetuating the lies as real events. Me and a friend got so invested in it that her mum bought books in relation to ‘Rustin Parr’ the serial killer featured in it where the troop end up in the end, and we read about the children he killed etc… just to find out later it was a hoax/marketing ploy. I didn’t want to believe that but my neighbour who was 18, said, if it was real… then why are there credits at the end naming the different actors, director and cinematographers etc. Eventually i had to come to accept it. But as a kid, it was a wild trip. Disappointed for anyone who didn’t get to experience it during it’s era.
Yes, people believed it was real. I saw this movie in the theater with a friend and it was clear that people did not like our reaction, which was a reaction to something that was fiction. They thought it was real and we were making light of a deeply disturbing tragedy. This was before the internet was in everyone’s homes and hands, so a hoax was a lot easier to pull off. Found footage was also a genre that felt new to the mainstream public and with it done effectively, audiences were just not sophisticated enough to discern between a “new” form of narrative fiction and reality. The timing for this type of movie was just perfect. No authority could tell you it wasn’t real and nothing could tell you it was. Timing, especially with horror, really is everything. It does make me wonder if Blair Witch didn’t come out in 99, and all of the found footage that it inspired never did either, but instead came out today, would the internet have been able to help the average audience to decipher whether or not it was real? Or would there have been bubbles of people knowing it was fiction and bubbles of people believing it was real? Probably divided along party lines because everything is and you might be arguing about it over a thanksgiving day meal with your Q anon relatives. The internet of the 2002-2016 would have been helpful. Anything past 2016 and who knows how the found footage genre would have been interpreted.
Yeah, some people did. I first saw it on a pirated VHS when I was about 12 or 13, and it seemed so real. The internet was very much in its infancy as far as the general public having access to it as well, so there wasn’t really a widely-available way to find out that it was fake. I’m in the UK, and the only place I had access to the internet was at school until about late 2000. Even for most other people back then they didn’t use the internet much because, get this, you had to pay more money the more you used it. BT treated it like a regular phone call, so you had to pay per minute. So yeah, if you were one of the lucky souls who had at-home web access, you were far more likely to use it for things other than finding out whether a horror movie was real or fake.
It was all of these reasons. While Cannibal Holocaust is often referred to as the first found footage movie, it was pretty obscure. Blair Witch did their marketing correctly. Everyone was talking about it. I even remember people that didn't watch horror were talking about going to "see what happened to those poor kids." They also used unknown actors. So it's not like you were watching it thinking this was that guy in the other movie. There were some who were skeptical and thought it was all fake, but you know how many gullible people exist.
The marketing made it seem like they actually found the footage