AILSA CHANG, HOST:
No matter how much a horror movie scares us, we can turn it off and be relieved that it's not real. But 25 years ago, a tiny indie called "The Blair Witch Project" convinced millions of people that the horror movie that they were watching might actually be real.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Do you believe the occult may be involved in the disappearance of your son?
CHANG: Made on a shoestring budget with unknown actors and a viral marketing campaign, the movie left a haunting and memorable mark on the horror genre. NPR's Brianna Scott takes a look at "The Blair Witch Project's" legacy.
BRIANNA SCOTT, BYLINE: Three student filmmakers - Heather, Michael and Josh - hike into the Maryland woods to shoot a doc about a local myth known as the Blair Witch. As they're filming, they get lost.
MICHAEL WILLIAMS: (As Mike) I gave you back the map, Heather.
HEATHER DONAHUE: (As Heather) I gave you the map.
SCOTT: They come across these ritualistic stick figures throughout the woods, hear the creepy cackles of children in the dead of the night. And when Josh goes missing one morning, bits of his blood-soaked shirt are found, along with some teeth and hair.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT")
WILLIAMS: (As Michael) Tell me where you are, Josh.
SCOTT: Eventually, all of them go missing, never to be seen again.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT")
DONAHUE: (As Heather) I'm scared to close my eyes. I'm scared to open them.
SCOTT: "The Blair Witch Project" opens with text telling us what we're about to see is the students' footage discovered a year after they went missing.
ALEXANDRA HELLER-NICHOLAS: So the magic of the Blair Witch isn't so much even the story itself as it is the way that the story is told.
SCOTT: Alex Heller-Nicholas is an author and film critic from Australia. Now, this style of filmmaking is known as found footage, and its roots can be traced back to the 1938 radio drama adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel "The War Of The Worlds," which was narrated by Orson Welles, presented as a news story.
HELLER-NICHOLAS: A sector of the public were really confused by this - people turning on the radio and hearing new stories about Martians invading New Jersey.
ORSON WELLES: The strange creatures, after unleashing their deadly assault, crawled back...
HELLER-NICHOLAS: It's a really important precursor to things like "The Blair Witch Project." In a way, it's like the ground zero or the birthplace of found-footage horror in a way, even though it was for radio.
SCOTT: But what really made "Blair Witch" a summer blockbuster hit in 1999 was its marketing. I mean, there were printed missing person fliers for the students. There was even a website where you could view photos of so-called evidence in the woods. Even a separate documentary about the students' disappearance was made.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Something about watching their last days on video film that I don't know if I can handle.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: I don't know. I can't...
ADAM LOWENSTEIN: The "Blair Witch" marketing campaign just whetted these things in a brilliant way to really push people to imagine that this is not just a film.
SCOTT: That's Adam Lowenstein, a film studies professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
LOWENSTEIN: It is a document of a horrific event that we are now getting to see in its aftermath rather than something that's been created for us fictionally.
SCOTT: But the marketing was so well-done that people forgot the actors were playing characters, not themselves.
ADAM B VARY: They had suffered a great deal of hardship and difficulty because the movie did use their real names.
SCOTT: Adam B. Vary is a senior entertainment writer with Variety. He recently interviewed the actors from the movie - Joshua Leonard, Michael C. Williams and Heather Donahue, who has changed her legal name to Rei Hance since retiring from acting. The actors told Vary they didn't see much of the movie's profits. Like, when the movie initially grossed over 100 million at the box office...
VARY: Artisan Entertainment sent the actors a fruit basket to commemorate the milestone as opposed to, you know, a check. And the actors told me that, you know, when they got the fruit basket, that was their first real understanding that they were going to be cut out of the movie's success.
SCOTT: The actors are still seeking fair compensation for their roles in the movie. But Vary says the actors are proud of the work they did on the movie, even though it would take years for the film to be fully respected. Despite its box office success, the movie was parodied relentlessly. It also came out a few months after Columbine and a few years before 9/11. And Alex Heller-Nicholas says these events changed the way people viewed horror.
HELLER-NICHOLAS: You saw a very sudden pivot to things that are now called torture porn films, to kind of deal more immediately with the things that people were really struggling with about the world after September 11.
SCOTT: Still, found footage horror movies like 2008's "Cloverfield" and 2009's "Paranormal Activity" have "The Blair Witch Project" to thank.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: If it's not a ghost, what is it?
SCOTT: Ultimately, "The Blair Witch Project" is a film that's left a terrifying legacy that still resonates with people 25 years on - a horror movie with zero jump scares, no creepy music, just pure terror.
HELLER-NICHOLAS: People think of horror, and they might think it's kind of gross, or they might think it's kind of excessive and funny. But a genuinely scary horror film, to me, is such a rare, precious thing.
SCOTT: There's talks of a potential reboot, requel (ph) - whatever people call it nowadays - with the film company Blumhouse. There's not many details on that yet, but horror fans are asking, how could something like "The Blair Witch Project," a product of its time, be recreated for today's audiences? We'll have to wait and see.
Brianna Scott, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SLIPKNOT SONG, "UNSAINTED") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
