Anatomy of a blockbuster: The Blair Witch Project

When The Blair Witch Project debuted to genuine screams and shudders in the midnight program at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, it fit precisely no ones idea of a blockbuster movie.

On the contrary, this decidedly lo-fi production about three student documentarians who get lost in a forest chasing a paranormal legend was the epitome of an independent Sundance movie, which is almost a genre unto itself.

Blair Witch was shot in just eight days on a reported budget of about $30,000, less than what a big Tom Cruise movie would spend on coffee. First-time feature filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez used unknown actors who were required to carry cameras and film themselves, shooting mainly on black-and-white 16 mm celluloid supplemented with some colour videotape.

And yet so effectively did Blair Witch spook Sundance and later the planet, ringing up nearly $250 million in worldwide ticket sales, the film became a blockbuster by stealth.

To put this into perspective, the Mike Myers spy parody Austin Powers:The Spy Who Shagged Me, released the same summer with massive promotion, earned $312 million globally. But that was on a production budget of $33 million, or about 1,100 times what it cost to make Blair Witch.

Blair Witchs awesome return on the dollar was just part of its almost supernatural success and influence. It also rewrote the book on movie promotion, pointed to the Internets social media future, created the now ubiquitous found footage genre and forced everybody to rethink not only the definition of blockbuster but also the truth-telling mandate of documentaries.

Arguably, the most significant effect of The Blair Witch Project was in demonstrating the marketing power of the Internet, which up to that point was seen largely as a geeks playground.

Recall that in 1999, there was no Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest or any other form of social media as we now know and use it. Most people used dial-up services to get online, a slow and unreliable process that made accessing audio difficult and video a technical nightmare.

Blogging was available but essentially unknown the term was only coined that year and many people regarded the net and the World Wide Web with a combination of fascination and suspicion.

This wouldnt necessarily seem like the most fertile ground to launch an innovative movie promotion. But Myrick and Sanchez and their distributors at Artisan Entertainment (later Lionsgate) who picked up Blair Witch for about $1 million at Sundance cannily realized that they could use both the Internets strengths and weaknesses to their advantage.

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Anatomy of a blockbuster: The Blair Witch Project