How could The Blair Witch Project's pseudo-realistic marketing ploy be pulled off if it were made today? Set in 1994, The Blair Witch Project follows student filmmakers Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard on a trek into the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while making a documentary on a local legend about the colonial-era witch. The leads of Blair Witch were never seen again, with their footage being discovered a year later and forming the narrative of the film.

The Blair Witch Project became a blow-out hit in 1999, and also convinced a significant portion of moviegoers that it was the genuine article by way of its documentary-style marketing campaign and fictional Blair Witch backstory. The real town of Burkittsville also blew up on every map of the United States, so the (fictitious) local Sheriff's frustrated insistence that "There is no G----mn Blair Witch!" to incoming tourists in sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was doubtlessly inspired by the real-life insanity the town subsequently endured, while the eerie stick figures came to symbolize the faux legend.

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Today, The Blair Witch Project is universally recognized as fictional, but the debate that raged over its purported authenticity at the time is half its legacy. More than twenty years removed from its release, the question of whether a similar tactic of marketing a completely fictional found footage horror as a real documentary could work today is a fascinating one. While there would need a bit of adjusting - some of it major - to pull off another Blair Witch now, it wouldn't necessarily be impossible to replicate the same trick.

Why The Original Blair Witch Was So Believable

Stick figures hanging in the trees in The Blair Witch Project

The success of The Blair Witch Project owes much to its found footage gimmick, the entire movie presented as a rough edit of the student trios footage during their excursion into the Burkittsville woods. With the shakiest of shaky cams and the complete absence of any and all post-production work aside from the footage from two different cameras being stitched together in chronological order, the crudeness of The Blair Witch Project made its story and mythology of a centuries-old witch feel incredibly real. Of course, this was only half of the equation.

The marketing of The Blair Witch Project propelled the movie to towering success by presenting it as a genuine documentary. The cast all used their real names in the film and spent a long time listed as "Missing, Presumed Dead" on IMDB. The film's official website also included mock police reports on the disappearance of the three, while the SyFy channel even aired the mockumentary - and best Blair Witch tie-in to date - The Curse of the Blair Witch on July 1999. This went in-depth on the legend of the Blair Witch, past supernatural events attributed to her, along with the story of the film students. When the movie hit theaters, large swaths of the public were convinced it was genuine which also caused the biggest headache ever for the real-world small town of Burkittsville, Maryland (which has a section devoted to the effects of the film on the Burkittsville Wikipedia page.) Through a combination of its marketing and the raw quality of the film, The Blair Witch Project became a cultural phenomenon, but the tactics that led to its success would be severely outdated today.

Why The Original Blair Witch Premise Can't Be Repeated

The Blair Witch Project

The ubiquity of found footage movies itself would be the biggest obstacle in recreating the faux realism that led to The Blair Witch Project's success, but that trend wasn't an immediate one. The 2008 releases of Cloverfield and Quarantine began to lead to a found footage resurgence. The 2009 debut of Paranormal Activity and its subsequent franchise led to an out-and-out renaissance, with the likes of Last Exorcism and the V/H/S series following. The problem for Blair Witch is that there have simply been too many of these movies since 1999, with audiences now conditioned to recognize them as fiction.

The format itself has simmered down considerably in recent years, but with Paranormal Activity 7 and V/H/S/94 on the way, found footage could have another surge. The Blair Witch Project was a different story, in that its success came out of not only feeling like it could be real, as Paranormal Activity had done with its demon Toby but very successfully selling itself that way. With found footage now a legitimate subgenre, all the missing persons posters and tie-in mockumentaries in the world wouldn't be able to pull off the same trick, audiences now seeing found footage as a scary thrill more than a document of actual events. Despite challenges like this, something like The Blair Witch Project's marketing trick would need other ways of being effectively utilized today, and it all goes back to the evolution of the internet since 1999.

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How Social Media Could Be Used For A Blair Witch Remake

Close up of Heather looking terrified in The Blair Witch Project

With the internet being a new thing in The Blair Witch Project's time, it was easier to create the illusion that the movie's story was real, thanks to a website with information on the missing parties or a bogus documentary presenting the fabricated mythology. With too many similiar movies in modern times, found footage itself having evolved considerably, and audiences more internet savvy than ever, Blair Witch-style marketing would need to step up its game. That's where contemporary social media would come into play. A modern Blair Witch-style found footage movie could set up false Facebook and Twitter profiles, with photos depicting the lives of the characters and snapshots of the events from the film. YouTube would also be invaluable in setting up ancillary videos presenting snippets of the events in question, while the newer platform TikTok could similarly be utilized to provide supplemental material that could be more easily presented as authentic by today's internet standards.

To some extent, the found footage genre has seen something along these lines in the YouTube series Marble Hornets. One of the most well-known series to dive into the mythos of the internet boogeyman the Slender Man, Marble Hornets was never marketed as real but used some Blair Witch-like tricks nonetheless. Episodes were uploaded to its YouTube channel to form a video log, another channel called "totheark" reinforced the series' story, in addition to an accompanying Twitter account established as a parallel outlet alongside the main series. A Blair Witch Project remake in modern times could use social media, YouTube, and TikTok in the same way, while a different title than Blair Witch would also be in order.

The illusion of The Blair Witch Project's mythology and marketing was always going to be a one-time deal with a built-in shelf life. For the film to work the same way today, social media and video sharing sites like YouTube would be its best bet at making the gimmick fly. Of course, considering the madness that Burkittsville, Maryland suffered through the first time around, it might also be best just leave The Blair Witch Project's marketing in 1999 - or at least use a fictional town.

NEXT: The Blair Witch Project's Fictional Legend Explained