Over the last five years, the popular horror website Bloody Disgusting has successfully entered the film production game with meaty horror movies such as Under the Bed, A Horrible Way to Die, and Southbound. If we assume that The Blair Witch Project was the film that launched the viral marketing trend in modern cinema, The Dark Knight was the one that perfected it. These practices, along with the huge merchandising production of action figures, board games, costumes, and what have you, significantly contributed to the film’s phenomenal commercial success. Christopher Nolan’s ambitious sequel to Batman Begins has indeed very little in common with Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s $60,000 indie flick. However, the film proved that viral marketing campaigns are a crucial aspect of contemporary film promotion, even for multi-billion budgeted Hollywood colossi.ĭeploying the slogans “Why So Serious?” and “I Believe in Harvey Dent”, the film’s marketing team kicked off an enormous advertising crusade, drafting all kinds of promotional strategies, such as fake political campaigns, propaganda posters, scavenger hunts, mass e-mail threads, and awarded fan cosplays. Okay, it’s sort of far-fetched to claim that The Dark Knight was directly inspired by The Blair Witch Project.
Here are 15 Movies Inspired By The Blair Witch Project. In the light of the sequel Blair Witch, whose trailer surprised the San Diego Comic-Con audiences a couple of months ago, it feels appropriate to take a look at its broad legacy. Furthermore, its groundbreaking promotional campaign revolutionized the use of internet for advertising movies, basically inventing viral marketing. It was influenced by genre classics such as The Shining, The Omen, Jaws, and the silent witchcraft documentary Häxan, but also inspired a whole new generation of horror filmmakers. In a genre stuffed with easy frights and jump scares, The Blair Witch Project offered a new breed of horror, focusing on what’s implied, generating fear by the unseen. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s extra low-budget indie about three filmmaking students who set off to make a documentary about a legendary witch was critically praised, but was received with awkwardness by a large part of the audience, due to its radical and unconventional filmmaking style. The cracks, crunches and rumbles from deep in the woods enhance a terror that’s pierced only by the beam of a flashlight.When it comes to The Blair Witch Project, not everyone realizes how greatly it impacted modern cinema.
Above all, 'Blair Witch' is a triumph of sound design. (Those who felt motion sickness from watching the original film, be warned.) The cast members, not quite the unknowns their predecessors were, nonetheless disappear into their desperate roles with impressive commitment. With a few new wrinkles worked into the mythology, particularly a nasty, literal twist on those creepy stick figures, the experience proceeds from disorienting to anxious to full-on, hurtling, gasp-inducing panic.
Wingard and Barrett briefly acknowledge the prior movie’s legacy, but they mostly devote themselves to rerunning its scenario with the dial turned up to 11. With all this technology in their hands, there’s no way they can get lost, right? (Right?) They’re outfitted with high-tech cameras including GoPros and even a drone. Her brother, James (James Allen McCune), is inspired to head back into Maryland’s Black Hills Forest in search of his long-lost sibling, and he’s joined by film student Lisa (Callie Hernandez) and friends Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid). So it’s something of a small miracle that the 17-years-later 'Blair Witch', essentially a sequel-as-remake (ignore 2000’s 'Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2'), emerges as satisfying in its own right and pretty damn scary.ĭirector Adam Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett, the accomplished team behind 'You’re Next' and 'The Guest', reference the pervasiveness of homemade footage by opening on a website: newly discovered video – apparently of original victim Heather –has been posted.
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The you-are-there vérité techniques that gave the 1999 horror movie such a frightening immediacy have passed into cliché, and there’s no way today’s audiences would fall for the original marketing campaign’s 'It really happened!' pitch. If there were any film whose lightning would seem impossible to recapture in a bottle, it’s 'The Blair Witch Project'.