BSA206 Week 11

Research the following for The Blair Witch Project film watched in class and post a Blog entry -

Director and year
Eduardo Sánchez, Daniel Myrick - 1999

Write a short review on the film and state if you would recommend this film
I would not recommend this film as it has too much shaky cam that actually gave me a headache at one point. The style is different and is interesting and a lot of the film was left up for the audience to imagine what will happen.

Discuss the marketing campaign for the film

What types of marketing were used?
The marketing team posted images around the town of the films "stickmen" along with the 3 documentary filmmakers who supposedly were never found after disappearing in the woods. They also used word of mouth strategies and as part of the campaign they also created fake documents, police reports, and newsreel interviews to encourage the assumption that the film was an actual documentary about real people who disappeared.
The Blair Witch Project is thought to be the first widely released film marketed primarily by the Internet. These augmented the film's found footage device to spark debates across the Internet over whether the film was a real-life documentary or fiction. During screenings, the filmmakers made advertising efforts to express the events in the film as factual, including the distribution of flyers at festivals such as the Sundance Film Festival, asking viewers to come forward with any information about the "missing" students. The campaign tactic was that viewers were being told, through missing persons posters, that the characters were missing while researching in the woods for the mythical Blair Witch. The IMDB page also listed the actors as "missing, presumed dead" in the first year of the film's availability.The film's website contains materials of actors posing as police and investigators giving testimony about their casework, and shared childhood photos of the actors to add a sense of realism.

USA Today has said that The Blair Witch Project was the first film to go viral despite having been produced before many of the technologies that facilitate such a phenomenon.

How did this contribute to the success of the film?

The film was regarded to have popularised the "found footage" film technique and paved the way for future films in this style. The film became a box office success, grossing almost $250 million worldwide against an estimated budget of $60,000, making it one of the most successful independent films of all time. The film now has  two sequels: Book of Shadows, which was released in October 2000, and a Blair Witch remake, released in September 2016.