Post Description: Grimsley senior Sophia Rosenburg writes about early internet culture and its role in the marketing campaign of the famous horror movie The Blair Witch Project.
The year is 1999. The internet is still in its infancy since its release for public use eight years ago, the most recognizable sound is the dial-up tone when you’re loading up AOL Messenger, and everyone is creating a website using the free service GeoCities. Despite new celebrity Bill Gates and his company Microsoft (along with its attempts to capitalize on the internet through the creation of Windows 98 a year prior), the internet is still considered mundane, especially compared to its status today. Technology, in general, is slow in its development, with house phones still holding their place firmly as the best way to communicate with friends, the popularity of the indestructible Nokia phone, and the use of floppy disks to save all of your information.
Pop culture, however, is in full swing! Britney Spears’s “... Baby One More Time” is at the top of the charts, along with “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” by Eiffel 65 and “No Scrubs” by TLC. Furbies are the most popular toy, still raking in millions of dollars with around 14 million being sold in just that year. Flare jeans and boob tubes make up your ideal outfit, and your platform sneakers are the hottest shoes on the market (thanks to the Spice Girls). However, movies and television are at the top of the game. American Beauty wins the Oscar for that year, and lots of other movies gain cult fame, such as Fight Club, The Matrix, and The Sixth Sense. One little, low-budget movie enters the picture, however, after months of anticipation through the first viral marketing campaign EVER in modern history. This movie will change the way future films are advertised forever. This is where The Blair Witch Project enters the picture.
The Blair Witch Project is a “found footage” horror film: a movie that claims to be made from, well, found footage that usually depicts a gruesome and disturbing event. At this time, horror was in a bit of a slump. The genre was consumed by cheaply made slashers that lived by the “blood and boobs” rule to draw in viewers, but The Blair Witch Project came in at just the right time to kick horror back in its place of being well-made and meaningful.
The found footage revolves around 3 film students—Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard—who, while making a documentary on the urban legend of the Blair Witch, suddenly get lost in the woods where the Blair Witch supposedly resides. Weird events begin to occur that torment the group and drive them insane. The movie begins with a grim black screen with white text that simply states:
“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near
Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary called "The Blair Witch
Project."
A year later their footage was found.”
In case someone is interested in watching this movie, I will not be spoiling the main events or what happens throughout the movie. Is the movie brilliant and a staple in the horror genre? Of course. There’s no doubt about it. But what makes this movie so interesting is what happened to stir public interest: AKA the marketing. The directors—Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez—along with Artisan Entertainment, the distribution company behind the movie, teamed up. Their vision was to convince the public that this was an actual event that happened and that these people disappeared due to a mysterious entity.
However, it’s important to note: The Blair Witch Project was NOT marketed as a movie or a mockumentary. It was to be viewed as a full-fledged documentary of a completely true story of a paranormal experience and the disappearance of three actual film students.
Back to our focus: we must ask how they did this? How did they manage to stir interest and conspiracy in something that had no chance of being real?
First came the website.
The Blair Witch Project website (found at blairwitch.com) was released before any trailers or ads ever came out and became the core of the movie’s marketing campaign. The website is simple due to the limited abilities of the internet at the time, but it provides a great balance of information and vague anonymity to grow public interest in the movie. It was updated consistently with new information, making people come back every so often to check what new clues had been revealed for curious visitors to look at. One of the pages is a timeline of the Blair Witch incidents throughout history. Another tab shows the pictures of the students in the film that had supposedly gone missing. Another tab depicts crime scene photos from police investigations, along with exclusive photos showcasing the legacy of the Blair Witch. The website is eerie with its lack of detail and specification. Photos are given short captions or none at all. The text is small and refuses to elaborate on disturbing details, such as where the footage was even obtained in the first place. If you go to the “Legacy” page and click on the images of the film canisters that were reportedly recovered, one video per image pops up. The videos are a grim black and white, grainy, and lack defining noise. Instead, the audio is static, screaming at its viewer from the computer speakers as it gives a simple taste of the movie to curious investigators. The timeline shows minuscule details about who, or what, the Blair Witch is, and how it causes its victims to mentally unravel.
The movie’s use of the internet did not stop there. Chat rooms and forums became ideal places for people to plant the seeds of curiosity. People would mention the strange website that was going around, linking it and sending it to people to check it out. These people would see the website for themselves and send it to their friends, who would then look at the website, and so on. Despite the internet’s infant status, these barely-developed chat rooms would help gain widespread interest in the film and whether it was real. The actor’s IMDb pages were even edited to say that they were missing and presumed dead, and they staged interviews with fake relatives to add to the sense of validity.
Next up: the trailer. Noting again that this movie was told to be an actual documentary, the trailer is the same as its corresponding website: vague and grim. Reviews from various outlets such as Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone are shown over black and white footage of the film, but only shots that had no discernible features. However, this trailer was not shown on popular cable networks. With it only being shown in between lesser-known shows on lesser-known channels, it added to the idea that viewers had come across something special, something that only a select few knew about (this would be disputed after the release of the film, however). Of course, along with the reviews came the address for the Blair Witch website, again bringing more traffic to the core of the movie and its lore.
But we can’t focus on the internet as the ONLY source of marketing. This is 1999; we won’t have the iPhone for another 8 years.
Artisan Entertainment, the godsends to this already horrifying film, made sure to not restrict its clever marketing strategies to just the internet. The company hung up missing posters of the actors across various college campuses asking people to call a tip line in case they saw or heard anything about the students. This campaign got so big that local news stations surrounding these colleges began to report the story as if it was real, unknowing of the fact that it was simply a publicity stunt for The Blair Witch Project. They hung up these same posters at the Cannes Film Festival but quickly took them down when it was announced that an unrelated TV executive had been kidnapped that same day.
The week after opening weekend, an ad was posted in Variety Magazine that simply said “blairwitch.com: 21,222,589 hits to date.” This meant that 11% of the 190 million users of the internet visited the website for The Blair Witch Project. The movie went on to make $250 million, over 10 times its budget of around $300,000, and spurred dozens of parodies and more films inspired by it. Those films include the infamous Paranormal Activity franchise. Parodies included a Blair Witch-inspired episode in the TV show Psych, as well as a Scooby-Doo spin-off released as a 20-minute Halloween special in the same year, appropriately called The Scooby-Doo Project.
Would this strange marketing campaign have worked as well today? Probably not, especially with how advanced and accessible the internet has become, and how wary people are of these ghost stories (despite the interest in SCP Containment Unit and Creepypasta stories). The limits of the internet worked very well in this movie’s favor, and its legacy still lives on as one of the most iconic, and most well-made horror movies in film history, and as the source of the first viral marketing campaign.
Don’t watch the sequels though, unless you just want to see hot goth girls.
Sophia Rosenberg is a senior at Grimsley High School and is someone who hopes to incorporate their hobby of writing essays into their future career. When they aren't burying themselves in schoolwork, they can often be found napping or watching Youtube videos on obscure topics.
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