The Academy has offered up another installment in their “Academy Originals” series, this time taking a look at 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, a film I still remember seeing well before it caught on nationwide.
I remember I was still in college when I first about it, though I can’t remember how. However, I do remember the original website detailed in this following video and I remember subscribing and visiting it frequently all the way up until Artisan purchased the movie out of Sundance and then I followed the updated website after that. So, when they say this is a film that kickstarted the idea of online viral marketing, I was definitely a part of that.
When the film finally came to Seattle I believe I saw one of the very first screenings and I brought three friends along with me to see it at Seattle’s Neptune theater. We stood in line for what seemed like forever and even once we were inside it took a while for the movie to start as the lights were dimmed and creepy sounds played softly through the speakers.
Once the film began I still remember that Haxan logo, a logo I associate solely with Blair Witch, much in the same way I have to assume a lot of kids of the late ’70s and early ’80s associate the 20th Century Fox logo with Star Wars above and beyond all other movies. And once it was over, I loved it as much for the film as for the feeling of being in on the ground floor of something you could tell was going to be huge.
I thought it was so inventive, not to mention hilarious listening to those that thought it was real, much in the same way people believed Paranormal Activity was real as it pretty much used the exact same playbook to success several years later.
Now, 15 years after Blair Witch, I’m sure many will pretend they felt it wasn’t scary, didn’t understand the hype, blah, blah, blah… but with over $248 million worldwide it clearly made an impression, whether you bought into it or not. It was definitely a film that, as the Academy’s video says, “changed the movies”, though with the rash of found footage features that would follow and rampant online viral marketing nowadays it’s up for debate as to whether it changed them for the better.
