At the start of The Blair Witch Project, where you'd expect to see the opening credits, a title card announces that the film was assembled from footage found buried in the foundation of an isolated cabin near Burkittsville, Maryland. The three film-makers, who have travelled there to interview residents about a famous witch and dozens of unsolved child murders that occurred in the area over the past 200 years, are said to be still missing.
Shortly afterwards, we see the three film-makers, college students, poking around a rural cemetery, laughing about a blood sacrifice that will make their spooky documentary shoot run smoothly. But it is clear this is not a typical horror movie. There are no Grand Guignol effects, no media-savvy serial killers, and no hip protagonists chatting knowingly about pop culture. The eerie, oblique story is as primal as the tale of Hansel and Gretel, but with a modern cinema-verité twist. It's certainly not an obvious blockbuster. Yet The Blair Witch Project, which cost just $40,000 to make, took an incredible $1.5m in its first weekend, breaking box-office records at the 27 American cinemas where it opened last week. It seems sure to become an international hit.
At the Cannes film festival in May, Blair Witch won the Prix de Jeunesse. But the buzz about the film began six months ago, when it made its debut as a midnight movie at the Sundance film festival. Within days, Artisan Entertainment, which is reported to have paid just over $1m for worldwide distribution rights, mounted an elaborate publicity campaign, including a website of supplementary photographs and video clips, intended to pique interest in the movie without revealing its secrets.
One key ingredient is the film's signature image: a crude, ominous stick-figure drawing of a man, the significance of which isn't clear until well into the movie. Amir Malin, the president of Artisan, says he becomes edgy just talking about the icon. "It's true, the thing scares me," he said. "It's a marketing person's dream, but I don't want it in my office."
Malin isn't alone in seeming in thrall to the Blair Witch spell. After an eight-minute trailer for the film was shown this spring on America's Independent Film Channel, the producers received a frantic phone call from a private investigator from New York. He had seen only the last three minutes of the clip, and was so shaken that he had spent several days trying to run down more information about the disappearances.
In its theme, Blair Witch bears some resemblance to Picnic at Hanging Rock, the 1975 Peter Weir film about the disappearance of three Australian schoolgirls. Unlike that polished movie, though, Blair Witch has all the earmarks of hasty, inexperienced and enthusiastic filmmaking: shaky camerawork, harsh lighting, and off-screen noise and laughter during important shots.
The three students - Heather, the project's charismatic, ruthless director; Josh, an easy-going camera operator; and Mike, a sullen sound man - are shown waking up at dawn, hungry, with rough voices and puffy eyes, grousing about who is responsible for getting them lost in the woods. As they venture deeper into the forest, their survival is threatened from without, by an unearthly, unseen presence, and from within, when, in their desperation and abject fear, they begin to turn on each other.
The inspiration for Blair Witch came not from horrific true stories but from the imaginations of two first-time directors, Daniel Myrick, 35, and Eduardo Sanchez, 30, who met as film students at the University of Central Florida. "We were talking one night about the best horror films ever made," says Myrick, "and we decided that there hadn't really been one that scared us, really scared us, since we were kids." The reason, he says, is that too many recent horror films have used satire and humour to reinvigorate a genre that had become predictable and repetitive. Some of their favorite horror films - Nightmare on Elm Street, The Shining and The Exorcist - force audiences to identify with the characters' sense of being trapped in a bad dream. And, Myrick adds, "that feeling of not knowing what's real stays with you after you leave the theatre."
The film-makers' own bad dreams, though, seem to have their origins in the movies they watched as children: mid-70s pseudo-documentaries such as Bigfoot - Man or Beast, Chariots of the Gods and Legend of Boggy Creek, about one of Bigfoot's swamp-dwelling cousins.
Inspired - and more than a bit unsettled - Myrick, at age nine, started a UFO investigations club while growing up in Florida. Sanchez, reared in Washington, says an episode of the television show In Search of_ caused him, as a child, to believe Bigfoot might peer into his bathroom window when he was taking a shower - an unlikely event, since his family lived on the second floor of a suburban apartment complex, and Bigfoot, according to most sightings, stands 7ft or 8ft tall.
When the two met years later, they collaborated on several short films, graduated and returned to their day jobs: Myrick worked behind the scenes in television commercials, tended bar and drove a truck, while Sanchez worked in webpage design and as a film-set decorator.
With no advance financing (their initial funding was raised with credit-card advances) and little time to shoot, the two came up with the idea of a cinema-verité thriller, one that could be shot on the relatively inexpensive formats of colour video and black-and-white 16mm film. It was practicality as much as anything, says Myrick. "With a strong premise, we didn't need stars," he says. "The movie wouldn't work with stars. All the weaknesses of low- budget film-making are this movie's strengths."
At first they thought of sending their characters into a haunted house. "But as we talked about it, we started talking about the fears we had as kids," Sanchez says. "We came up with a story we wished we'd heard around a campfire - a 200-year-old legend about an outcast, a cursed town and a series of child murders and unexplained disappearances."
Perhaps because they have drawn upon urban legends and well-known ghost stories, Myrick says, people have been saying, "Blair Witch? Oh, yes, I've heard that story before." He continues: "It's romantic, I think, to have some spooky house down the street, or an area in the woods where people are afraid to go, because it's an Indian burial ground. We took that feeling and built a world around it."
The imperiled film-makers are portrayed by Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams, who spent several uncomfortable days and nights camping in a Maryland state park. Guided by a handheld global positioning system and brief notes left for them by the actual film-makers, the actors followed a directive to film everything they did and said. Though they had been briefed on the basic premise of Blair Witch, and warned about the discomfort they would suffer during production, the actors did not know how their stories would unfold.
"Dan and I had it easy," Sanchez says, laughing. "They were out there in the rain, in the woods." Each night, though, he and Myrick made surprise visits to the campsites, making threatening noises and shadows and scaring the actors out of their wits. To navigate in the dark and to elude the actors' ever-present cameras, Myrick and Sanchez relied on the expertise of one of their producers, Gregg Hale, a former sergeant in the army's special forces who had endured lengthy training sessions on how to evade capture in enemy territory. The cast and crew's exploits, which Myrick and Sanchez call method film-making, produced 20 hours of usable footage and some surprisingly naturalistic performances.
The film's directors are already at work on their next project - a comedy that will also use their brand of method film-making. Until then, they hope audiences won't learn too much about the mythical villain of The Blair Witch Project. "We want to let people make their own assumptions about what they see," Sanchez says. "It seems real, it looks real, it feels real. We're not saying it's the truth, and we're not saying it's not. We were smart enough, as we were making the film, to realise we have something different here." Myrick agrees. "The legend of the Blair Witch has taken on a life of its own."
