Over the next several years, they came up with the Blair Witch lore, hired a few unknown actors who could do improv, scraped some money together and production got underway in October of 1997. In and around 1993, they were talking about horror movies-and the recent drought of truly great ones-when they thought about the potentially terrifying consequences of a group stumbling upon a house in the woods and not being able to resist going inside, despite knowing that something appalling was happening. Not to mention, no one was racing to Facebook or Twitter to spoil the fun.ĭirectors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez met as students at the University of Central Florida School of Film. Same with that shaky, hand-held camera technique. That took some getting used to as well, and there were reported occurrences of nausea and vomiting.)īoosted by a rather ingenious marketing campaign that teased the film entirely as the product of tapes discovered in the woods of Burkittsville, Md., after an unknown but presumably horrible fate had befallen three student filmmakers, The Blair Witch Project benefited from the kind of organically grown anticipation that's hard to duplicate these days.

(The idea wasn't conjured out of thin air, but it certainly didn't become a full-fledged thing until 1999. Now it's been 22 years since The Blair Witch Project in all its haunting, low-budget glory landed in theaters and launched a new genre of horror movie: found footage. Two years later, their footage scared up almost $249 million.

In 1997, two directors and three unknown actors disappeared into the woods, toting handheld cameras and a concept.

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