happy 10th anniversary, Blair Witch Project

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VH1 wrote: 'Blair Witch Project' Cast And Crew Celebrate 10-Year Anniversary

'I'm proud of that film ... it was a group of people working completely outside of the system,' star Josh Leonard says.

"We really had no idea what we were doing," said "Blair Witch Project" co-director Daniel Myrick to MTV News in June 1999, little more than a month before his indie horror film swept into theaters, scared up $250 million at the worldwide box office and set a trend of online viral marketing that is still being followed today.

Myrick and his collaborators might not have had a clue what they were up to, but years later, on Tuesday's (July 14)10-year anniversary of the flick's theatrical release, "Blair Witch" has become an undeniable classic of the horror genre. Not that any of the key players, even to this day, know exactly how to deal with such recognition for past accomplishments.

Josh Leonard, who played one of the young filmmakers lost in the Maryland woods, admitted in a recent interview that until recently he hadn't been introduced as anything but "the 'Blair Witch' guy" at a dinner party in a decade. "I'm proud of that film, not necessarily for what it became in its cultural-icon status, but because it was a group of people working completely outside of the system, who took a totally punk-rock, DIY ethos to making something," he said. "And then it caught on."

"Psychically, it was a pretty damaging experience," he added.

Myrick, too, has struggled with the weight of lofty post-"Blair Witch" expectation, and now looks back wistfully at the late '90s. "It was a pure, innocent, unencumbered time in our filmmaking careers, which will probably never be repeated," he told us recently.

Presenting itself as a documentary compiled from found footage, "Blair Witch" followed Leonard and his two friends on a journey into the woods to document an urban legend about a witch who killed children. They end up getting sucked into a beyond-frightening supernatural freak-out that — 10-year-old spoiler alert! — leads to their disappearances. Shot on an ultra-tight budget in which the actors followed clues, via GPS devices, left by Myrick and his co-writer/co-director Eduardo Sanchez, the film became a Sundance hit and — partly due to a newfangled online viral-marketing campaign — a cultural phenomenon upon its mainstream release.

And it wasn't for lack of competition. Films like "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace," "The Sixth Sense" and "The Matrix" opened that same year. Suddenly the "Blair Witch" upstarts found themselves at parties with Britney Spears and the folks from "American Pie." When Artisan threw a 1,000-person "Blair Witch" party in Cannes — complete with a faux forest constructed on the Parisian beachfront — Leonard said the entire cast kept asking one another, " 'How the f--- did we make that movie and get here?' We felt like intruders."

Myrick said he and Sanchez busted out cigars and laughed to each other, "This is it, man!"

Leonard went from working as a caterer to appearing on "The Tonight Show." Myrick and Sanchez were offered just about every horror film in development at the movie studios. One project they barely touched was a "Blair Witch" sequel, which landed with a thud at the box office in 2000. Both the filmmakers and the actors continue to be known, perhaps solely, as the "Blair Witch" guys.

Ten years on, it seems Myrick and Leonard each have a complicated, yet ultimately warm remembrance of their time working on their little horror flick that became an iconic piece of American cinema. The last time Myrick watched his film, three years ago, he was alone in a hotel room.

"It was playing on demand," he said. "I'd seen all the porno flicks, and I said, 'Ah, I'll watch "Blair Witch!" ' "
like i said back here (viewtopic.php?p=24249#p24249), i loved it. hard to believe it was 10 years ago.

Re: happy 10th anniversary, Blair Witch Project

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Yeah, that's really disturbing that it's been so long, I start to feel old whenever "the grand old days of the internet, 1999" start getting thrown around.

I don't think BW ends up completely paying off on its promise, but at the time I thought they did a pretty good job of dread build-up. Speaking of paying off on promise, the filmmakers went on to do just about nothing (the esteemed Freaky Links aside, heh).

Tried to watch the sequel and turned it off after 10 minutes.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

Re: happy 10th anniversary, Blair Witch Project

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you should stick with the book of shadows, it's actually pretty cool. very different, but cool nonetheless. or maybe it's just that i like Erica Leerhsen naked. or both.

as for after, yeah - i really enjoyed seeing heather on oh, i don't know, a zillion steak 'n' shake commercials. thanks BWP. and i think each of the three played a "bad guy" on law & order, separately.

Re: happy 10th anniversary, Blair Witch Project

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The 10th anniversary of Phantom Menace made me feel old as it is. Where the hell does time go?
Entertainment Weekly wrote:'The Blair Witch Project' 10 years later: Catching up with the directors of the horror sensation
Jul 9, 2009, 04:29 PM | by John Young

July 16 will be the 10-year anniversary of a little movie called The Blair Witch Project. Perhaps you've heard of it? The film's spectacular journey from Sundance indie to mainstream phenomenon has become Hollywood legend, so much so that Roger Ebert named Blair Witch one of the 10 most influential films of the 20th century. The movie gave hope to young, broke filmmakers everywhere -- all you needed was the cost of tuition for one year at college, some cheap cameras, and a very, very, very clever idea.

Since Blair Witch made $249 million worldwide on its initial $20,000-$25,000 budget, others have tried to duplicate its unprecedented success, including none other than the film's own two directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. Still close friends, Dan and Ed went their separate ways after Blair Witch, each taking some time off before making a series of horror or supernatural flicks. Myrick directed Believers, Solstice, and The Objective; Sánchez helmed Altered and Seventh Moon. Haven't heard of those movies? Don't worry -- most of them went straight to DVD. But it can't be easy when your debut picture shatters records and is so convincing that some people, to this day, believe it's an actual documentary. How do you possibly follow that kind of once-in-a-lifetime anomaly?

EW talked to both of the Blair Witch directors individually, as well as the movie's three stars. To find out what has happened to those three young actors post-Blair, check out the new issue of EW, on newsstands July 10. But for now, enjoy this exclusive Q&A with directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, who discuss how they shot the groundbreaking movie, what they make of the subsequent backlash against it, and whether they'd ever want to return to Blair Witch.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: I've heard so many different stories about how you guys went about filming Blair Witch. Could you clarify exactly what it was like shooting the movie?

EDUARDO SANCHEZ: When Dan and I wrote the script, it wasn't really a script. It was more like a glorified outline of all the scenes. We didn't have any dialogue because we knew we wanted to make it completely improv. And then we decided we were going to leave the actors out there and try to remote-control direct them. We developed this system where we would leave notes for them in these little 35mm film canisters, and the notes contained logistical information as far as where to hike, and what time to get to a certain spot that we had already entered into the actors' GPS units. We also provided character notes, like "Heather's driving me crazy" or "You've got to get away from Mike" or "Josh is slowly losing his mind." And then we let them do their own thing. We'd supply them with fresh tapes and batteries, and we would give them food. As they neared the end of the shoot, we started depriving them of food. By the last day, they were basically living off a banana and some juice.

Were the actors upset by the end of production?

SANCHEZ: No, they weren't. We took good care of them. Our producer, Gregg Hale, was in the Army and had Special Forces training, so he led the whole "keeping them safe" part and had escape routes from all of the locations. They had a walkie-talkie with them. If they needed anything, they could just call.

As for the film's budget, I've seen various figures.

SANCHEZ: Well, the original budget to get the film in the can was probably between $20,000 and $25,000. Then, once we got to Sundance to make a print and do a sound mix, we were probably more in the neighborhood of $100,000. And then once Artisan Entertainment bought the film, they put another half-million dollars into it. They did a new sound mix, and they had us re-shoot some stuff. They didn't like the original ending with Mike standing in the corner. They asked us to shoot some new endings -- Mike hanging by his neck; Mike crucified on a big stick figure; Mike with his shirt ripped open and all bloodied. We shot them but ended up staying with our original ending. So the budget of what you saw in the theaters was probably $500,000 to $750,000.

How early did you know that might have something special?

DANIEL MYRICK: We were intending to hopefully amass maybe 20 or 30 minutes of usable footage out there in the woods. Originally, the film was intended to be a fake documentary where we'd have all this analysis and talking heads that would support this "found footage." It wasn't until later when we started compiling all this footage that Ed and I started realizing we may have a whole film in just what we shot out in the woods with the kids. But because it was pretty unorthodox, we really weren't sure how an audience would respond to it. And then when we got to Sundance, the response was pretty overwhelming.

Was it apparent after that very first screening at Sundance?

MYRICK: Yeah. The first screening was at midnight at the Egyptian, and the line was around the building and down the alley. And that night the movie was bought -- we were the first sale at Sundance. That's when we started thinking, well, maybe we have a potential for a theatrical release here. We talked to the Artisan guys, and I think their most optimistic projection was around $10 million at the box office. And after Sundance had run its course, Cannes was next, and it wasn't until Cannes that I realized the film was starting to take on a life of its own.

What's your take on the backlash that inevitably followed?

SANCHEZ: Well, Blair Witch started competing with Hollywood movies. Once you start competing with Hollywood movies, you have to deliver the formula that audiences are expecting, especially in a horror movie. You've got to have a certain kind of scare, a certain kind of reveal at the end. People like things to be tied up at the end of the movie. There are a lot of people who probably shouldn't have seen Blair Witch. It just wasn't their movie. It's like El Mariachi or Clerks making $140 million. It was an indie movie that blew up. We went from the underdogs to the guys that were beating the studios, so all of a sudden we entered another league that our film probably wasn't ready for.

MYRICK: The film, kind of by design, was meant to be seen on a smaller screen. It's a home movie, and when you see something like that on a 30-foot screen, it almost takes away from the experience. Some people were expecting this big Hollywood thing, and they had to reprogram their minds to see something that was completely different.

If you could have controlled how much success Blair Witch had, would you have changed anything?

MYRICK: If I had to do it all over again, it would have been nice if it had just been a successful indie movie that was graded more on its merits rather than the hype. I don't think the actors got enough credit for the performances they pulled off. They were so real and authentic that people thought they were real and authentic. [Laughs] Yeah, they were almost too good, and the same with the direction and screenwriting. Our whole job was to make it look like it wasn't directed. And so that all got lost in the hype. It all got lost in the big marketing push and the rags-to-riches story.

What projects were you being offered right after Blair Witch?

SANCHEZ: They kept sending us scripts of just pretty much every horror film that was in development or about to go into production. We got offered The Exorcist prequel, but they were like, "Look, here's the script. We start shooting in two months!" Dan and I could not have made another horror movie right away. We were in this really dark place with Blair Witch for two or three years, and we just felt we needed to get the hell out. And we finally found ourselves with money, and it was time to buy a house, buy a nice car, get married, and start having kids. So life all of a sudden got in the way of filmmaking, which had never happened before to me! [Laughs]

These days, is being affiliated with Blair Witch more of an advantage or disadvantage?

SANCHEZ: It's definitely an advantage. It's one of these films that everybody knows about, so we can get a meeting with anyone we want. I feel honored and privileged that I was a part of this movie, and it's given me a career. And it still has a lot of juice -- we're in the very opening stages of possibly doing another Blair Witch movie.

A prequel or sequel?

SANCHEZ: Well, if someone came up and said, "Here's $20 million," the prequel would probably be our No. 1 movie. But there are some cool sequel ideas that we have right now. At the same time, for Dan and me, there's this challenge of living up to the creative excitement that we had working on the first film. We really have to be 100 percent sure that it's going to elicit a similar response to what the first one did for the fans. And that doesn't mean we shoot it again in first-person video. You can't start the next Blair Witch movie with a shaky video camera. You just can't. It would turn people off immediately. Okay, so now what do you do? It is a challenge, but we're up for it.
Just cut them up like regular chickens

Blair Witch 3

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http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/mo ... tes-sequel
Nobody from Eduardo Sánchez's house will be going out trick-or-treating tomorrow dressed as the Blair Witch.

"I have young kids, my oldest daughter is 8, and they're still a little too young," Sánchez, 40, was saying yesterday from his Maryland home.

"They know I made The Blair Witch Project, but they have no idea what it's about, and I don't want them to know until they're much older. So I'm dressing up as an alien, my son's a clone trooper and my daughter will be either a hobo or a gypsy or a cowgirl."

It might seem as if Sánchez is trying to evade the creepy woodland crone who shot him and co-creator Daniel Myrick to fame, fortune and enduring influence 10 years ago.

And for a while, he and Myrick were indeed on the run from Blair Witch: "We didn't want to be seen as one-trick ponies."

They turned down offers to direct the 2000 sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. Documentary director Joe Berlinger took up the challenge, attempting to blow up the myth but instead seeing his confused efforts explode on impact at the box office.

Times have changed for Sánchez and Myrick, and rather swiftly in recent weeks. After years spent pondering their Blair Witch legacy, while pursuing other horror and sci-fi projects, they're willing to ride the broomstick again.

They're now at the point where they're ready to do a Blair Witch 3, once again sharing writing and directing. They'd pick up from where the original left off, pretending Blair Witch 2 never happened. The duo recently went on a drive through their original Blair Witch haunts, about a half hour from Sánchez's Maryland home, looking for inspiration.

They've worked up a treatment for a new story, which would involve original cast members Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams, albeit in smaller roles.

"We're at the step where we're about to pitch to Lionsgate, which owns the movie rights now. It's pretty much up to them. They can completely squash it or greenlight it."

The renewed witchy fervour for Sánchez and Myrick came from watching all the copycats, especially Paranormal Activity, the haunted house shocker by rookie director Oren Peli currently atop the box office. It follows the shakycam, first person, micro-budget footprints of Blair Witch so closely, it's a wonder there isn't a stick figure Blair logo on every frame.

Sánchez disputes reports this week that Paranormal Activity is now more profitable than Blair Witch, which made $249 million (U.S.) worldwide on an initial production investment of $20,000.

"I wouldn't be completely honest with you if I said I wasn't jealous of Paranormal Activity," Sánchez says.

"I'm happy for the guy ... but at the same time, there's the feeling that, man, I could have done this. It would have been different and might not have been as good. But I know how to make these films. To me it's like, man, maybe I should go back and kind of milk this one more time."

But neither Sánchez nor Myrick are interested in just photocopying what they did with Blair Witch, which deserves its status as a modern horror classic. It still chills as effectively as ever, exploiting the power of suggestion to the max.

Sánchez wants to use a technique he calls "mixed first-person," which would mean less reliance on the Blair Witch innovation – now a cinematic cliché – of having the protagonists speak directly into their fidgety cameras.

He laughed when he saw Cloverfield, another Blair Witch wannabe, and the characters never dropped their video camera even when being chased by a Godzilla-like monster.

The closest he's seen to the mixed first-person technique he seeks is District 9, the summer '09 sci-fi hit that begins in documentary style before segueing into a conventional thriller.

Sánchez hopes to first try the mixed style with Possessed, a low-budget horror he's also involved in, which he promises will "show things that have not been seen before. Hopefully audiences will dig it."

But old habits die hard. Sánchez spoke at a screenwriter's expo in Los Angeles two weekends ago, and he was surprised by how many people want Blair Witch 3 to be another true shakycam experience, just like the original.

"I asked the crowd, `Who would be turned off by that?' And nobody raised their hand. Then I said, `Who wants to see more shakycam?' And everybody raised their hands. We might have a problem here. We still haven't really decided yet, but instinct-wise it seems that doing the same thing would probably be a mistake."

Ever resourceful, Sánchez has a compromise in mind. And the same thing applies to his Halloween plans for tomorrow. There might be some Blair Witch in there after all.

"You know what? I might hang a couple of stick figures out front this year."
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

Re: Blair Witch 3

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was just coming here to post this. i don't think there's any reason to "forget" BW2 - it could have easily happened off to the side as it didn't directly involve any of the principles....

Re: happy 10th anniversary, Blair Witch Project

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WENN wrote:The Blair Witch Project Star Donahue Turns Pot Grower

The Blair Witch Project star Heather Donahue is set to open up about her new life as a marijuana gardening specialist in her upcoming memoir.

Student filmmaker Donahue shot to stardom as the lead character in the amateur psychological horror film in 1999 but she grew frustrated with showbusiness after struggling to find work following the movie's release.

She tells the Philadelphia Daily News, "I took all my stuff into the desert related to my acting career and burned it all."

Shortly thereafter, Donahue received a medical marijuana prescription to control her premenstrual syndrome (Pms) symptoms and she became such a strong believer in its effects, she began cultivating pot as a "solitary country girl" in California, in a bid to help others.

Now she's sharing her experiences with fans in GrowGirl, which is scheduled for release in America on 5 January.

And while fans of the Blair Witch movie may be disappointed to hear much of the film's memorabilia has been burned, Donahue reveals she did retain one keepsake - the iconic blue ski cap she wears throughout the film.

She adds, "That's the only thing I kept. I figured if things got really bad, I could always sell it on eBay."
you know, after her seemingly endless run of steak & shake commercials and blips on law & order, you could have predicted that she wasn't going anywhere. not because she wasn't a good actress - she was passable - but because you could tell she was picking & choosing her projects, being careful not to be "typecast", etc., when she should have just been working as much as possible.

so you're bitter on hollywood's endless ADHD affair with the hot star. we get it. no reason to fucking destroy cinematic history. what a cunt. have fun being an aging hippie. hopefully someone 20 years from now does a "documentary" with the "survivors" of blair witch and dredges you up just enough so that you regret everything you destroyed.

Re: happy 10th anniversary, Blair Witch Project

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CNN wrote:'Blair Witch' actress Heather Donahue quit acting to grow pot
"I wanted to change my life, see what else was out there for me," Heather Donahue said, shown here in 2002.

In 1999, Heather Donahue was unexpectedly catapulted to stardom as a co-creator and costar of the indie horror film "The Blair Witch Project" -- who memorably filmed herself crying in terror in the genre-breaking flick.

A few short years later, just as unexpectedly, her acting career stalled. And soon she was embarking on the most peculiar of second acts -- that of marijuana grower.

"I took all my stuff into the desert related to my acting career and burned it all," Donahue, who turns 37 on Thursday, tells the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Well, she did spare one thing: the blue ski cap from the "Blair Witch" poster.

"That's the only thing I kept," she says. "I figured if things got really bad, I could always sell it on eBay."

At the time of "Blair Witch's" release, Donahue told PEOPLE that her newfound fame was "hilarious and overwhelming." But soon she became disillusioned. "The acting projects I was lucky enough to work on weren't always things that I felt good about putting out into the world," she says now in a Q&A on her website. "I didn't see that getting better as I got older. I wanted to change my life, see what else was out there for me, what else I might become."

She ended up following her then new boyfriend into a strange new life of growing marijuana, mostly for medical purposes -- a journey she relates in her forthcoming memoir, "GrowGirl: How My Life After The Blair Witch Project Went to Pot."

Donahue ended up living for a year in Nuggettown, California, with a bunch of growers and their "pot wives," helping to build grow rooms and tending to the crops. She tells the Inquirer that she was "always an avid gardener" and quickly fell into a routine, becoming "a solitary country girl" after her years in the fast lane in L.A.

She gave up growing pot after deciding to write about it -- and after a friend got busted by the feds.

Donahue, who is now on a book tour, is torn about whether marijuana should be legalized. On the one hand, she's worried that corporations might run over the mom-and-pop growers. But at the same time, she thinks it's foolish to outlaw it.

"Cannabis has been intertwined with human culture for thousands of years," she says on her website. "It's here to stay as medicine, as an industry, and as a component of the culture. The idea that such a hearty, useful plant could be legislated out of existence seems pretty foolish, especially in retrospect."
CNN reminds me she was one of the leads in the spielberg mini-series Taken. i've talked at length here about taken. one of the best mini-series' ever to air, and one of my favorite spielberg works. loved it. so yeah, i'll give her that.

Re: happy 10th anniversary, Blair Witch Project

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I just read a little thing on this in the New Yorker, sounds like she's written a book about her decade or so of dating and assisting a pot grower in California or something. She did come across as a bit lost in life.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

Re: happy 10th anniversary, Blair Witch Project

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no...no no, it's very evitable.
/film wrote:A Third ‘Blair Witch Project’ Movie Is “Inevitable” Says Co-Director

The first Blair Witch Project was a cultural landmark. We’ve covered this in the past. But no movie that grosses $250 million against a budget of $60,000 is immune to the terrors of Hollywood. A sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was released just a year later and though it made money, it was a terrible excuse for a follow-up.

Fifteen years have now passed since the last Blair Witch film and the horror genre has changed and evolved probably at least that many times over that time. You’d think the train had long left the station in terms of a Blair Witch Project 3 but, according to the film’s co-director Eduardo Sanchez, that’s not true. He said talks are ongoing with Lionsgate and a third film is “inevitable.” Then again, he’s been saying that for a long time. Read more below.

Sanchez was recently talking to Dread Central about his new film, Exists, and said the following about The Blair Witch Project 3:

We have been talking to Lionsgate and there has been a little bit of movement but nothing is concrete. The film seems inevitable to me, but really it’s just a matter of it being the right time. I’m thinking it’s going to happen sooner than later at this point, but I always say that. There’s always rumblings and certain ideas being pushed around and such. While I don’t have anything firm to talk about now, it wouldn’t surprise me if something happened within the next year or two.

Story wise, there’s obviously lots of different ways a third Blair Witch Project can go. The sequel tried the “Fans who see the movie investigate” angle, but didn’t do it particularly well. You could do that again. You could set it in modern day, as a meta-look back at the phenomenon and then get sucked into the reality. You could go back in time and tell a prequel type story or just pick the story up the next day, with the families of the missing kids going on the hunt.

Honestly though, none of those ideas are particularly exciting, and that’s probably why the film has yet to happen. No doubt, if a really good idea was hatched, “The Blair Witch Project” has enough name recognition to at least make some money. And that’s what Sanchez is saying here. Eventually, one of these ideas will stick.

Also, it’s important to realize the above quote acknowledges this isn’t the first time Sanchez is saying this stuff. He and co-director Daniel Myrick have been discussing The Blair Witch Project 3 for years. We ran stories in 2009 and again in 2011 about the possibility. That 2011 interview had this particularly interesting tidbit from Sanchez:

I actually liked the sequel but at the same time it exists in a world outside of the movie. So if we want to do a sequel to ‘Blair Witch Project,’ we have to stay in that world, which ‘Book of Shadows’ didn’t stay in that world. ‘Book of Shadows’ created a different world. It’s like if the sequel to ‘Jaws’ started with shots of people lined up to see ‘Jaws’ in the movie theater. For ‘Book of Shadows’ it worked in a certain way but to me my biggest gripe with Artisan was you shouldn’t have called it ‘Blair Witch 2.’ It would’ve been fine to call it Blair Witch Chronicles. It wasn’t really a sequel to our movie. so it would be a direct sequel to our film living in that mythology of Burkittsville, being possessed, haunted by something.

So, yeah, this is your nearly biennial update on The Blair Witch Project 3.

Re: happy 10th anniversary, Blair Witch Project

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well well, here we go. turns out "the woods" was really "blair witch 3".
Geek wrote:Upcoming horror movie The Woods was actually a Blair Witch Project sequel all along

Surprise! There’s a new sequel to the 1999 found footage horror movie The Blair Witch Project coming out this September. Lionsgate, who is distributing the movie and has the Blair Witch rights after purchasing Artisan, managed to keep this a secret until the movie premiered at San Diego Comic-Con late Friday night. In a world where we have drones taking set photos from Star Wars movies a full year before they are due to be released, it’s quite an accomplishment that the filmmakers managed to keep Blair Witch a secret.

Up until the film was finished, the movie that is now called Blair Witch was in production in Vancouver last year under the title “The Woods.” In May of this year, Lionsgate even released a trailer for The Woods without revealing the subject matter of the movie.

As far as anyone knew, The Woods was just the next movie from director by Adam Wingard and writer by Simon Barrett, who had previously collaborated on other films You’re Next and The Guest. What the production managed to keep secret was that they were rebooting the Blair Witch Project franchise.

“The Woods was our working title,” Wingard told Entertainment Weekly. “When we signed on to it, we knew that it was eventually going to be changed. To us, it wasn’t even going to be part of the marketing. But I think Lionsgate made a really smart decision, using that.”

There was a screening of The Woods on Friday in San Diego and as the movie unspooled for fans and critics, the advertising all changed. The Woods ads around San Diego were replaced with Blair Witch ads, the Lionsgate booth on the convention floor changed to a Blair Witch booth, the Twitter account abandoned The Woods for @BlairWitchMovie while the screening was in progress.

Then, the movie unleashed the first trailer for the newly titled Blair Witch, revealing it starred James Allen McCune (Shameless) as the brother of the Heather Donahue character from the first film (the actors in the first film used their own names as character names). Heather’s body was never found, so he sets off into the woods where she disappeared to find out the truth about what happened to her.

Early buzz about Blair Witch indicates that it doesn’t reference the ill-reviewed sequel, Blair Witch Project 2: Book of Shadows, but is more of a direct continuation of the first film in a way that could recontextualize the ending. If that sounds vague, it’s because it is vague, but it indicates the mythology of the original movie is still relevant to whatever is going to happen this year.
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Re: happy 10th anniversary, Blair Witch Project

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i watched this new movie last night. it is EXACTLY the same movie, with more people and better tech. i mean, exactly. so stupid.

it also seems to ignore the events of BW2: Book of Shadows. this was their first mistake. that is an underrated movie. it occurred to me while watching this crap last night that BW:BOS is kind of the same movie as the vvitch, just several centuries later. like, it would be interesting to find out that that guy built his compound on the same land where black phillip roamed or something. but connecting these two films would only cheapen the fantastic vvitch. was just a thought that occurred to me.