The greatest piece of Movie Marketing ever?...20 years on!
In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found...
Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick's found footage horror film The Blair Witch Project was released 20 years ago this year and it changed the way movies were marketed forever.
"What if we used the fake documentary format of the likes The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972) to make a film as legitimately frightening as Jaws (1975)". This was the initial spark for Sanchez and Myrick's tale of a group of documentarians venturing into the woods in search of mythic evil only to never return, their fate recorded on video footage. The movie was shot and made for a reported $60,000 and went on to make $248,639,099 at the worldwide Box Office.
"I grew up around the woods and swamps of Florida. For a long time, I had this idea of seeing a stick figure hanging from a tree and it creeped the hell out of me. Ed Sánchez, a friend from university who ended up co-directing, helped me work this into a 35-page treatment about three students who go missing after heading out into the Maryland woods to make a documentary about a legendary witch. The idea was that this film was put together later, using the footage they shot. In the late 90s, with digital coming into its own, it was only a matter of time before someone made this kind of first-person movie". Co-director Daniel Myrick told The Guardian Newspaper.
“We were at the right place at the right time.”
"We set up a base at a house in Germantown, Maryland, that Ed shared with his girlfriend. There were 10 to 15 of us there for six weeks, sleeping on couches and on the floor. The shoot took eight days and was a 24/7 operation. It wasn’t like a normal film: the actors would work the cameras, filming each other all the time. Using GPS, we directed them to locations marked with flags or milk crates, where they’d leave their footage and pick up food and our directing notes". "These would say things like: “Heather, you’re absolutely sure that to get out of this mess you go south. Don’t take no for an answer.” Or: “Josh, somewhere along the way today, you’ve had it with this bullshit.” They had the freedom to decide how to play it: we only intervened if we felt they needed to tone things down. Then there were the “gags” we’d pull at night that they had to react to – like hearing the children’s voices, or feeling the tent being shaken".
The Blair Witch Project wasn't the first found-footage film ever made, and neither was it the only such film released in the late 90s. But there was one thing that was new it's phenomenal marketing.
Around six months before Blair Witch was first screened at Sundance in January 1998, directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick launched a website. The internet of the late 1990's was a lot of "Under Construction" signs, the online encyclopedia and a screeching dial-up tone but despite the internet being fairly new to many consumers, it was the perfect and most instrumental component of the teams marketing campaign. The Blair Witch site was simple and capitalised off the homemade concept. The site was an extension of the storyline, telling the myth of the Blair Witch and giving information on the missing filmmakers. It didn’t sell the movie instead focused on the myth to confuse and scare viewers, building up the hype for the film. The producers kept adding content over time, adding stories and footage the directors had obtained during filming.
Tasked with pulling together the website was Jessica Rovello, director of online services at Artisan Entertainment, who had bought the movie for $1m.
"We went from total anonymity to the cover of Newsweek in a very short time. Artisan played the real-life disappearance angle as much as possible. We were specifically not invited to the Cannes premiere and, for a while, were listed as deceased on IMDb. Our parents started getting condolence calls. There are people who still don’t believe it’s fiction. I sometimes think Artisan would have been happier if we had actually been dead".
It was a "dream," project for Rovello because the directors and production company Haxan Films had passed on a massive amount of creative collateral. "The images were digitised and uploaded on to the site to create the illusion that private photographs and news coverage had been gathered by investigators, with fresh content being put online on a regular basis". Rovello told The Drum. "When the studio acquired the movie and when the marketing team started talking we all had a feeling that it was going to take off in this way and that it could be a cultural phenomenon," she adds. "I don’t remember having an experience like that since where you think that something is going to happen and it actually does." The website was plugged on message boards, while entries on IMDb stated that the students behind the film were deceased.
"We went from total anonymity to the cover of Newsweek in a very short time. Artisan played the real-life disappearance angle as much as possible. We were specifically not invited to the Cannes premiere and, for a while, were listed as deceased on IMDb. Our parents started getting condolence calls. There are people who still don’t believe it’s fiction. I sometimes think Artisan would have been happier if we had actually been dead" Actor Joshua Leonard told The Guardian.
Along with online marketing, there was a real push offline with the studio plastered missing person posters around college campuses directing people to the platform, giving an "air of legitimacy," to the digital mythos. The leaflets were actually put up in Cannes during the film festival and removed shortly after, it turned out that a television executive had been kidnapped in real-life in an unconnected event.
The film opened on July 19th across 27 screens, averaging $56,002 per screen It widened to 1,101 theaters on July 30th, then doubled that number on August 6th. Following it's opening weekend success the marketing team took out a full-page advertisement in Variety Magazine, instead of celebrating the movie’s impressive $1,512,054 opening, the page read: “blairwitch.com: 21,222,589 hits to date.”
In an analysis of the summer’s box office, Variety’s Charles Lyons wrote on Sept 8, 1999 “The filmmakers and Artisan’s true genius came in their prescience to treat the Internet as another vehicle for storytelling. They created folklore surrounding the Blair Witch. They added faux documents about the missing students. And, above all, they intrigued browsers.”
As the new millennium began, studios began coming up with ingenious ways of using the ever growing internet to get people talking and seeing movies. Although few tried to pass their events off as fact, like The Blair Witch Project. The film demonstrated two important points about advertising in the modern age: It is possible to build up an entire back story and that if consumers feel as though they've stumbled on a piece of information for themselves they are more likely to get behind the brand.
Today, movie's like Deadpool have used viral marketing campaigns to build hype pre-release but nothing quite like The Blair Witch Project.
“We were at the right place at the right time.” Myrick told Variety.
"I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes a hit," Rovello, told The Drum "but nobody really knows."
"In terms of Blair Witch, it had something to do with the zeitgeist – you know what was going on in the ether, people’s thinking, culturally and what was new, interesting and innovative. Sometimes things just kind of spark and catch fire."
For more on the movie revolution of 1999, I would recommend Brian Raftery's Best. Movie. Year. Ever. Below is a summary of the book:
In 1999, Hollywood as we know it exploded: Fight Club. The Matrix. Office Space. Election. The Blair Witch Project. The Sixth Sense. Being John Malkovich. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. American Beauty. The Virgin Suicides. Boys Don’t Cry. The Best Man. Three Kings. Magnolia. Those are just some of the landmark titles released in a dizzying movie year, one in which a group of daring filmmakers and performers pushed cinema to new limits—and took audiences along for the ride. Freed from the restraints of budget, technology (or even taste), they produced a slew of classics that took on every topic imaginable, from sex to violence to the end of the world. The result was a highly unruly, deeply influential set of films that would not only change filmmaking, but also give us our first glimpse of the coming twenty-first century. It was a watershed moment that also produced The Sopranos; Apple’s Airport; Wi-Fi; and Netflix’s unlimited DVD rentals.
Best. Movie. Year. Ever. is the story of not just how these movies were made, but how they re-made our own vision of the world. It features more than 130 new and exclusive interviews with such directors and actors as Reese Witherspoon, Edward Norton, Steven Soderbergh, Sofia Coppola, David Fincher, Nia Long, Matthew Broderick, Taye Diggs, M. Night Shyamalan, David O. Russell, James Van Der Beek, Kirsten Dunst, the Blair Witch kids, the Office Space dudes, the guy who played Jar-Jar Binks, and dozens more. It’s the definitive account of a culture-conquering movie year none of us saw coming…and that we may never see again.
