The website amassed more than 20 million page views before it even hit cinemas. Donahue recently told Vice's Broadly how the experience had impacted on her, noting that her mother was sent sympathy cards and people personally stopped her in the street to tell her they "wished" she was dead and that they wanted their money back.
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The buzz around the movie was so great that the actors behind the main characters, – who used all their original names – were actually presumed to be missing or dead by some viewers. "People started saying that we were faking the whole thing in terms of the success of the project, they were saying 'it’s impossible, you’re shutting down your own servers to make it look like they’ve overloaded' and 'you’ve faked all of this excitement behind the site.'" "At 24-years-old and kind of being in the midst of this great phenomenon, it was also my first exposure to backlash," she recalls.
Rovello, who now heads up gaming publisher Arkadium, says the site got so popular that the the servers crashed. Reports from the time have also suggested that the marketers behind the stunts drip fed information into threads on internet forums dedicated to the 'legend' of the Blair Witch. If somebody tried to do it today it would happen but it would probably be debunked so quickly that it wouldn’t have the ability to take time to catch on." "I think because the internet was still a fairly new medium that helped. She also muses that the advent of social platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, would have made it much trickier for the marketers of the spinoff to pull a similar stunt. "I don’t remember having an experience like that since where you think that something is going to happen and it actually does." "When the studio acquired the movie and when the marketing team really started talking about it we all kind of had a feeling that it was going to take off in this way and that it could be a cultural phenomenon," she adds. Dedicated pages offered up a timeline of the "major events," in the history of the Blair Witch, background on the supposedly missing students (Heather, Michael and Josh) and interviews with the victim's 'families' lamenting their untimely disappearance.įrom there, the concept "took on a life of its own," notes Rovello. The site helped plant the seed that urban legend of an evil witch camping out in the woods in rural Maryland was actually true long before the film's release. The low-budget flick has transpired to be the fifth highest-earning independent film of all time, but in lieu of the finances for Hollywood-style special effects and a mammoth marketing strategy, the directors instead relied on viral marketing (in the 1999 sense) to propagate the myth that the story told in the movie was actually real and that the film was a documentary.Īt the heart of this was a dedicated website created by the movie's distributors at Artisan Entertainment.
The premise of the The Blair Witch Project was a simple one, but with a $60,000 budget and eight days of film reel its creators couldn't have begun to imagine that the movie would go on to gross $248m worldwide. "In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary.
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