As Adweek noted in 1999, the “little indie that could” left Hollywood “scrambling to figure out if guerrilla marketing on the Web is a blessing or a curse.” Out of nowhere, a troupe of University of Central Florida grads seized the reins of the internet and forged a new path for modern-day moviegoing. Promotionally, they extended their storytelling to both web forums and television “documentaries,” upgrading the concept of word of mouth to straight-up virality, and laying the groundwork for future internet folklore. Stylistically, cocreators Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez conjured a new level of verisimilitude by embracing the equipment and amateur camerawork of the masses, spawning (or at least popularizing) the “found footage” horror subgenre. The Blair Witch Project’s principal photography cost a mere $35,000, but it went on to gross about $248.6 million at the box office-an indie film record at the time. That “something” was a cultural phenomenon that fundamentally changed the way we interact with entertainment. I don’t know what it was, but this is going to be something.’”ġ999 Movies Week: A Celebration of the Best Year in Film I remember sending notes to my editor that night, saying: ‘This is going to be something. “You felt like something was going to be out there. Magic enough for him to get inside his head. “That first night it was like magic,” he remembers. Hochman left the Egyptian Theater and wandered through the woods to his condo, terrified and wondering whether he’d just watched a snuff film, or an entirely new genre of horror flick. … A year later their footage was found.” What followed was spliced-together bits of shaky Hi8 video and black-and-white 16mm film footage from the wilderness, punctuated by the three students’ increasingly paranoid arguments, desperate screams, and, eventually, their demise. It opened with a prologue that read: “In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. It was a typically chilly night in Park City, Utah, where Hochman was covering the Sundance Film Festival for Entertainment Weekly, and the movie he’d just watched was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. That’s what David Hochman told himself on January 24, 1999, after a midnight showing of a little indie film called The Blair Witch Project.
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