'Curse Of The Blair Witch,' The Documentary That Fooled Us All
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The Blair Witch Project (1998) did more than scare a generation senseless. It launched the trend of “found footage” horror movies. Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez had stumbled onto a gold mine, using low-budget techniques while still appealing to the masses. It was replicated in films such as Paranormal Activity, Trollhunter, and Cloverfield. However, the creativity of Myrick and Sánchez did not stop with the movie. A mockumentary called Curse of The Blair Witch was released on the Sci-Fi Channel before the film hit theatres.
In the 1990s, mockumentaries were not unheard of. This Is Spinal Tap! had become a cult hit ten years prior, but they were certainly not common in horror, and they were easily identifiable as satire or parody. Myrick and Sánchez made Curse of The Blair Witch hyper-real, creating an entire legend for their villain, going back into history. There were fake interviews with historians and residents of the area, photos, and shots of the woods. They also included re-enactments of the narration. The format of the program and camera work was very similar to the Discovery Channel documentaries. If you were flipping through the channels, you would have mistaken it as part of their normal fare.
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Filming was actually split between Burkittsville and Germantown, MD, but the production invented the town of Blair. The show gave details of the hauntings of faux historical figures that are identical to the spooky events in the movie, so anyone watching it would connect the two. The documentary mentioned finding the tapes that were supposedly the source of the movie. Myrick and Sánchez built the fear factor, by tuning the audience into these small details, (such as the wooden symbols in the trees) as well as encouraging them to think that the disappearances were based on a real legend or real event.
It was all part of a comprehensive marketing campaign that included missing person leaflets of the actors, a sleuthing website complete with photos of mock police photos, and plants in chat rooms spreading the legend and directing people to the website and documentary. The mockumentary and marketing campaign did such a good job of convincing theatergoers of the witch’s existence that Heather Donahue’s mother received sympathy cards. By the time the movie was released, audiences were primed and ready. It was the first time that a horror movie had tapped into our psychology and scared us before we had even entered the theater. It is no wonder that it achieved such a dramatic reaction. People fainted, threw up, and there are fans to this day who genuinely think that the story of The Blair Witch and the missing students is more than fiction.
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Other horror films have tried and failed to achieve the same level of success. M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004) also launched a mockumentary shortly before the movie was released in theatres, but it did not help the film’s performance at the box office. The Ring was the next horror movie to embrace viral marketing, but it did not reach the heights of The Blair Witch Project either. Curse of The Blair Witch documentary was such an integral part of the deception that it was included as an extra on the DVD and is still available on Amazon Prime. Horror fans should watch it as part of a double bill with The Blair Witch Project as the creators have intended.
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Source(s): Thrillist, GQ, Site-Seeker, Screen Rant, The Wayback Machine
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