It exposed new possibilities for marketing in the internet age. Its amateur aesthetic prompted a generation of filmmakers to pick up a camera, however low-tech. Produced for $60,000, the film went on to make $248.6 million at the global box office, an indie record at the time. Today, “Blair Witch,” released 20 years ago this week (and streaming now on Hulu), remains an inflection point for the movie industry. “The prime directive we had was that the film had to look completely real,” said Eduardo Sánchez, who conceived and directed the entire thing with Daniel Myrick, from the manufactured legend to the film itself.

But a lot of viewers didn’t know that going in. What eventually emerged - a feature-length film made of spliced together scenes of shaky home video footage - made the demise of its three characters seem all the more authentic and terrifying. The hype, intrigue and skepticism surrounding the account, fueled by the internet’s advent, grew through the movie’s premiere, in July 1999. The online message boards began to buzz, with questions about the story’s veracity. Their footage was recovered a year later, providing evidence to support a disturbing legend. More than a year before “The Blair Witch Project” hit theaters and became a cultural phenomenon, its central mystery had already gone viral.Īccording to the movie’s fledgling promotional website, which presented itself as a real investigative project, three film students - Heather, Mike and Josh - had ventured into the Maryland woods in 1994 to shoot a documentary and then disappeared.

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