No plot, no dialogue, very little food: How The Blair Witch Project was made

Perhaps what makes the experimental film so scary - even 25 years on - is that the actors really were a little lost. K Narayanan rewinds for highlights.

The ad appeared in Backstage magazine, in June 1996.

The three actors - Heather Donahue (above), Joshua Leonard and Michael C Williams - were sent out each day with GPS coordinates to follow. All dialogue was ad-libbed.

Haxan Films was looking for men and women aged 18 to 25, for a movie called The Black Hills Project. The ad included the rider that these were “EXTREMELY CHALLENGING ROLES; to be shot under very difficult conditions”.

About 2,000 people responded. Those who auditioned saw a sign that read “If you get this role, you will be subject to uncomfortable physical situations. You will never be in harm’s way. You

The directors manipulated the surroundings, adding strange noises at night, around the campsite where the actors were sleeping, and hanging stick-figure voodoo dolls through patches of forest.

Sanchez and Myrick developed the idea into a screenplay of about 40 pages and no dialogue. All dialogue would be ad-libbed. The final touch: the film would be made from footage captured by the actors — raw, grainy, shaky, and seemingly found later.

At the audition, prospective actors were asked to play the roles of convicts facing a parole board, presenting their case for release after 10 years in prison. Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael C Williams, the eventual cast, made a powerful impression; Donahue in particular. She was the only one who argued that she shouldn’t be released, in a performance so impressive that it “scared the crap out of us,” Sanchez later said.

The cast learnt to use 8mm handheld film cameras, handle sound on digital audio tapes, and improvise dialogue. But these weren’t even the most remarkable aspects of how this legendary piece of horror, now 25 years old, was made.

Each day that they worked on the film, the cast had no idea where the story was headed.

To enhance the sense of realism, the directors kept them in the dark on a range of production details. They were given GPS coordinates to follow, and minimal information about what they would encounter along the way.

Myrick and Sanchez manipulated their surroundings, adding strange noises at night, around the campsite where the actors were sleeping. They hung stick-figure voodoo dolls through patches of forest. Painted sticky tar-like patches onto trees.

They took other steps to ratchet up the tension. Food dwindled. The lunch handed to the actors before they headed out went from a sandwich and a bag of chips to just the sandwich, or just the chips.

“By the last couple of days, there was enough to sustain, but not a lot of food,” Williams said in a 2019 interview with Vice.

Filming was completed in eight days. Editing took more than eight months.

The Blair Witch Project premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999 and was a huge hit with the audience.

Successors such as Paranormal Activity would try and fail to recreate that sense of lightning in a bottle.

One month before the premiere, the filmmakers created an extensive online presence that presented the Blair Witch legend as real. A website was launched containing photos, “evidence” and fake police reports about the “disappearance” of the actors.

This strategy was so cutting-edge at the time, tapping into early internet culture, that many viewers, for years, were left wondering how much of what they were watching was “real”.

As The Blair Witch Project reinvigorated the found-footage genre — which had lain more or less dormant since the 1980 film Cannibal Holocaust, about a documentary crew that goes missing in the Amazon Rainforest — people refused to believe that Donahue, Williams and Leonard were still alive. Conspiracy theories abounded. Police reached out to the actors’ families, which fanned the flames.

The movie, which cost about $60,000 to make, earned more than $140 million at the box office. Haxan would go on to produce a sci-fi Fox TV series called FreakyLinks (2000), and the numerous horror films (Altered in 2006; Seventh Moon in 2008; Lovely Molly in 2011 and Exists in 2014) but would never have another hit like Blair Witch.

A host of imitators have followed in the years since: Cloverfield (2008), the Paranormal Activity franchise (2007 on; with seven films made so far), Europa Report (2013; a found-footage take on a crewed mission to Jupiter’s moon).

Nothing so far has managed to recreate the lightning-in-a-bottle effect of the three students caught in a strange, spooky wood.

It remains a classic of filmmaking, a truly scary film that shows what is possible without multi-million-dollar budgets or green screens. With, instead, an authentically original take on an eternal trope: What if you’re out in the woods at night, and you’re not really alone?