The Blair Witch Project is a cult classic horror movie which released in 1999. It was about a group of film students going out to the woods of a small town to shoot a documentary for school. Apparently, the woods were cursed by the “Blair Witch” who was the lore of the whole documentary. Things don’t go as planned as the students get lost in the woods and are forced to survive while being followed by something unknown. The movie was shot so precisely that it was hard to decipher whether it was real or fake. This was what made the film so terrifying.
The marketing of the film was beyond impressive, and was one of the major contributing factors to the films success. The Blair Witch Project was marketed as found footage. The team faked police reports, missing person leaflets, and spread rumors about what actually happened. It was truly genius.
The rumors spread to the early internet and had people in a frenzy. This went viral in the early internet, which didn’t happen often. The filmmakers would send information to different websites as a sort of propaganda for the film, and it worked. Fictional stories and conspiracies would be made in chatrooms across the world.
All of these theories and fake news added to the terror of the movie (which was thought to be an actually documentary). Though, don’t let the antics fool you.. Blair Witch is certainly one of the scariest films ever made. Personally, I didn’t see any of the marketing before I saw the movie. Yet, the film still makes me feel uneasy even thinking about it.
