Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez tell us how they started a found footage frenzy with their pivotal 1999 horror, The Blair Witch Project.
In 1999, a tiny indie film changed the face of horror. Its viral marketing campaign was soon adopted by bigger Hollywood movies like Cloverfield (2008). Other filmmakers rushed to make their own documentary-style shockers – most notably writer-director Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity (2007), which helped turn Blumhouse Productions into the horror powerhouse it is today.
The Blair Witch Project was the work of first-time directors (and former University of Centaal Florida film students) Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, who in the early 1990s came up with their initial concept: the movie would essentially be a faux documentary, cut together from the film and video material left behind by three investigators who vanished while investigating the legend of a witch. On an initial budget of at most $60,000, The Blair Witch Project was semi-improvised by its three actors, Heather Donahue, Michael C Williams and Joshua Leonard. The production spent eight days in a remote stretch of woodland, with the actors filming each other and the crew coming up with devious methods to provoke terrified responses from the cast.
Picked up at Sundance and given a wide release in July 1999, The Blair Witch Project made almost $250m in cinemas alone. For its creators, however, the success was bittersweet; the franchise continued largely without the involvement of Myrick and Sanchez. Its actors, who used their real names and were paid little for their work on the movie, watched as the franchise took on a life of its own, their names and likenesses used without their receiving any residuals or other compensation.
As The Blair Witch Project gets a new Blu-ray release courtesy of Second Sight, Myrick and Sanchez tell us the fascinating story of their film – how it unexpectedly exploded in 1999, earning the ire of one M Night Shyamalan, and how it feels to have the franchise carry on without their involvement.
Film Stories: Now you’ve had a quarter of a century of perspective, how do you feel about what you created?
Eduardo Sanchez: Dan and I have been talking about this yesterday and today. It’s an amazing thing. That 25 years later, people like you are still interested in talking about it and then a company like Second Sight takes the time and money to revisit the film, go back and re-transfer the footage and give it so much love. We feel honoured, man, we feel humbled. It blew up. It’s become so much more than we ever anticipated.
When we first started, it was just, ‘let’s try to get a video deal and sell this movie and make the money back for our investors.’ And maybe get a little bit more money, make another movie, and build our resume. This movie put us on the map. It changed our lives; we were able to buy houses and pretty nice cars and live our lives like normal people instead of struggling filmmakers.
And then to have 25 years of so many people loving it and continuing to love it is an amazing experience. We feel blessed that we were a part of this because it took a lot of people to make this movie.
[After leaving University in 1993, Sanchez and Myrick, along with three other graduates, founded independent production company Haxan Films. It was then that they first began thinking about making some sort of documentary-style horror film set in a remote woodland.]
Daniel Myrick: We did a slew of student films. And I started working in the industry in Orlando as an editor and DP, and bouncing around from gig to gig – typical stuff. And Gregg [Hale, Haxan co-founder who later produced Blair Witch] was working in LA in the art department and Ed was working in web design and shooting stuff as well.
So we were all in and out and dabbling in stuff. But as time went by, I really wanted to shoot a movie – that’s the whole reason why I got into film school in the first place. And so we reconnected and said, ‘let’s develop that woods film that we were talking about.’
We thought the premise was really cool. So I was meeting up with Gregg. Gregg was at the same place in his life. He was bouncing around in LA and he called me and said, ‘Hey, man, what you got going on?’. I remember saying, ‘Dude, come back. Let’s do something. Let’s start working on a script or whatever.’
So he came back and we started working together on this script. In the middle of that process, I pitched him this idea that Ed and I came up with, and he sort of fell over himself and said, ‘Dude, let’s make this movie.’ And he put in some of his own money up front. And that’s really what got the ball rolling for us – Gregg’s money, but his determination to keep going. That’s one of his strengths. He’s like a bull. He keeps us on task and keeps us going.
We started developing it and put together this little investor reel and started beating the bushes to raise money for it. And we incorporated some of our other friends: Ben Rock [production designer] and Christian Gueverra helped out with the development process and sort of fleshing out the story and the universe that we were building. And one thing led to another and we were able to get the thing going and made.
It’s a fairly typical indie movie story that is kind of cliche now, but we were all broke. We didn’t have any money or resources and we were sort of pulling everything together to try to get the thing going. Then [TV producer and host] John Pierson came into the scene. I shot a segment for him on his show Split Screen, and he gave us some money for a couple of episodes that we did for that. And that was a big part of our budget in order to shoot the movie in Maryland.
And then the rest is history. But yeah, it was a labor of love for a while. And a labor of desperation.
Eduardo Sanchez: Yeah, we were all at the end of our ropes. If this movie hadn’t been successful, we would have… I mean, I would have had to declare bankruptcy. I don’t know what I would have done. But it’s like Dan said, it’s a typical [story]: before Blair Witch, we’re struggling, first of all, trying to graduate from film school and working on our own student films and trying to get them sold and failing and learning the pain of professional rejection and trying to figure out what the hell we’re going to do. And then we’re like, ‘let’s give it one last shot.’
We got our best idea, which was the Woods movie. And luckily we were able to get the people to help us and we made it.
The late 90s was a bit of an odd time for horror movies. There’s some good ones, but they’re often self-referential and not necessarily that scary. Some used a lot of CGI. Did you intentionally make Blair Witch as a reaction to that?
Daniel Myrick: We were.. I wouldn’t say disenchanted, but I wasn’t quite understanding the whole horror genre at the time. Because like you said, it wasn’t scary. I grew up on films like The Exorcist and The Omen and stuff like that – they were great films. The scripts and the characters, the performances and the execution of those films were so exquisite, and they resonated forever. I wanted to be scared like that again. Both Ed and I wanted a movie that actually scared you, didn’t have the pretext of horror, but really did deliver on the real primal scares. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was the last movie that really did that.
We took this documentary-style approach, which we thought would be really effective in that regard. Because we were inspired by TV series like In Search Of… and movies like The Legend Of Boggy Creek [1972 documentary-style horror], which really had that effect on us as well.
So it was a bit of counter-programming at the time. I don’t think it was any conscious mandate on our part – ‘let’s show Hollywood up and do this.’ We were framed in by our budget restrictions. Like Ed said, it was our best idea at the time, but it was also the most doable idea for us. All the traditional weaknesses of independent film, like having no money for effects or anything like that, ended up being our strength.
Daniel Myrick: All our horror had to exist in the mind of the viewer. So it was about, how do we convey this horror and keep it in the mind of the audience? We were going on instinct. We wanted to do something that scared us with the hope that it would scare the audience – and maybe unconsciously it was a response to Hollywood’s big movies like Ghost Ship that we didn’t find scary. But it certainly ended up being dubbed as counter programming to Hollywood at the time. But invention is the result of necessity. We were just trying to make something, anything really, that was halfway decent.
Eduardo Sanchez: Yeah. Also it’s 1999 when the movie came out, but we came up with the idea in the early 90s, before CGI. But there was definitely a lack of scary movies. And that’s how the conversation started. And then I think that it just happened to be that we released it in 1999, and then like a month later, The Sixth Sense came out, which was the combination of two pretty scary movies back to back.
In fact, it was weird timing, because I met M Night Shyamalan. I went to the premiere party of one of his movies and the first thing he said was, ‘You know, man, I’d been working on Sixth Sense for so many years, and a month before it comes out, your movie comes out and I was so angry at you guys. Because it was the first scary horror movie in so long.’
And I was like, ‘Look, dude, you made a lot more money. We set you up.’ You know what I’m saying? It was a perfect setting for his film. But it was funny that we came up with the idea in the early 90s, and there’s exceptions, but movies were more about being sarcastic and funny and self-referential instead of actually being scary. And it just happened to be that we released the movie in 1999. The timing was great.
[Writing around their limited resources, Sanchez and Myrick came up with a simple concept: a group of three young filmmakers go into a stretch of Maryland woods to investigate the local legend of a witch. They subsequently disappear, leaving their cameras and hours of footage behind. The finished Blair Witch film was later marketed as a hoax, with its actors asked to remain out of the public spotlight in order to maintain the ruse that they’d gone missing.]
Do you see Blair Witch as part of a lineage of horror storytelling? Because Edgar Allan Poe was not only doing first-person stuff, but also writing stories as hoaxes. I wondered if you ever thought about that.
Daniel Myrick: There’s definitely a through-line there. I was a big fan of ufology back in the 70s and 80s. I’d have UFO magazines with these blurry photos of hubcaps flying in the air. And I would take all these hoax pictures in my neighbourhood because we had a UFO club at the time. And so there was this whole subgenre of fact or fiction. Is it real? Is it not real? Bigfoot and the Yeti and all that stuff. And it was creepy. Especially as a kid growing up in those times, you go out in the woods and Bigfoot’s in the back of your mind.
It plays into that fundamental fear that we all have, that survival instinct of not being at the top of the food chain. When you’re out there and you’re isolated, whether it’s the water or the woods: you’re no longer king of the hill as a human being. You’re now beholden to the Apex predators out there. And it’s scary.
I think Blair is reflective of that primal trigger that we have when we’re seeing something that feels like it could happen to you. And the woods is a great backdrop for that. So yeah, those early shows And that whole sort of like fact-or-fiction conceit is still effective.
Eduardo Sanchez: Yeah. And as far as Edgar Allan Poe, not that we’re experts on him or anything, but those were the stories that really stuck with me when I was a kid, his short stories. And the first-person way he wrote was really effective.
I think it ties into what Dan was saying. The documentary stuff and writing in first person and even hoaxes, like [Orson Welles’] The War Of The Worlds, it’s all based on, ‘let’s try to make people think that this is real.’ With first-person writing, you’re playing the character. Obviously that’s going to be a lot scarier than seeing things from a distance.
[Armed with a limited budget, a small crew and a couple of cameras, The Blair Witch Project began filming in October 1997. Actors Heather Donahue, Michael Williams and Joshua Leonard spent eight days in a Maryland state park, improvising dialogue and filming themselves as their nerves unraveled.]
I rewatched the film this afternoon. And I was really struck by how good those three performances are. Genuinely, they hold up.
Eduardo Sanchez: Unbelievable, unbelievable, yeah.
Daniel Myrick: I don’t think the actors get enough credit for it. The biggest part of our job as directors is to cast the right people and then let them do what they came to do. So our casting process was really involved and took a long time. We had to come up with some unique approaches to finding people that were really good at improv. Like, this is not a normal movie. You’re not going to have a trailer that you’re going to be able to go back to. This is going to be a 24-seven shoot.
You don’t have a script to work from. As a matter of fact, even the premise of the film is going to be limited. You’re going to know what your character would know. We took this method approach to the production as much as they did to the performances. So it was a whole big experiment that they had to embrace and trust us as filmmakers and vice versa. They had to have the chops to do it and the imagination to pull it off.
What’s a real testament to their talent is that they did a fantastic job in convincing the audience that they were really in duress; they were really fighting for their lives out there and up against something they couldn’t explain. Especially Heather – whenever I hear her going through that house at the end of the movie and those screams, they’re chilling. They’re absolutely chilling.
Eduardo Sanchez: Yeah, they cut right through you. Second Sight gave us a lot of material, about 22 hours of footage. A lot of it was just handheld, shaky stuff, walking through the woods. But they gave us like, 22 hours of unique footage. There were very few times that we actually had to do multiple takes on stuff. It wasn’t like a normal movie.
When we were editing it, it was amazing to us how much material they gave us and how we were able to manipulate it in the editing room. It’s like how you could manipulate the first draft of a script: ‘let’s change these things and make the characters do this.’ We were able to do that with the footage because they gave us so much material.
Obviously some of it didn’t work. You can’t be a hundred percent, and you’ll see that in the Second Sight release. We’re putting a bunch of deleted stuff on the Blu-ray, and you’ll be able to see a lot of stuff that’s never been seen before. Some of it’s pretty damn good material that we had to cut out because we couldn’t do a three hour movie.
The other thing that came home to me was obviously you’re shooting it with hi8 camcorders and a 16mm film camera. It’s raining and you’re out in the elements. What were the challenges there? Because obviously there’s a very real potential that what was captured could have gotten ruined.
Eduardo Sanchez: All the time. All the time, man.
Daniel Myrick: Yeah. A lot of credit goes to our DP, Neal Fredericks. He was tasked with making sure the cameras were working and that they were loaded. That batteries were charged and down to the fine details of making sure we had the right F-stop because the actors weren’t filmmakers. So we had to make sure that we were getting the correct exposures.
Eduardo Sanchez: Yeah, and also you couldn’t be sitting over their shoulder saying, ‘Hey, you’re doing this wrong’. So yeah, it was very challenging.
Daniel Myrick: There was a time we were watching the footage and Heather had the camera zoomed in the whole time. If you thought [the finished film] was shaky, you should have seen it on the first day or so. I told Heather, ‘You gotta zoom out, go wide with everything because it’s unwatchable.’
Daniel Myrick: Neal had a big part in making sure we had an image at the end of the day that we could actually watch and cut together. It was, again, an experiment. We weren’t sure if any of it was going to work.
Eduardo Sanchez: We were making it up as we went along, man!
Daniel Myrick: Yeah. But we had an awesome team around us. And, whenever one of us would go off the rails, there was always someone there to keep us in check. After the first couple of days of seeing their performances, I felt a lot better.
[After around eight months of editing, the finished, 81-minute cut of The Blair Witch Project was submitted to Sundance Film Festival. To the filmmakers’ surprise, their little movie was not only accepted, but was so eagerly anticipated that its midnight premiere in January 1999 sold out. Distribution company Artisan Entertainment then stepped in to buy the rights to Blair Witch for a reported $1.1m.]
So you went through that process of editing, you took it to Sundance, and then of course you had your fateful meeting with Artisan. What were your memories of that like? I mean, was that a pinch yourself moment? Was it tense?
Eduardo Sanchez: Yeah. Sundance was, at the time, one of the only festivals that was creating careers. Like you come out of Sundance and all of a sudden you’re a filmmaker. I guess it still is [the case], but there’s other festivals now. But basically the target for every independent filmmaker was to get a movie into Sundance, so that was our target. So when we found out we got in, it was monumental. It was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s the first step. Even if nothing else happens, at least we got into Sundance and we’re going to have this experience’.
So we got there and we were prepared. We found the right people around us to give us the right advice. By the time we got to Sundance, we had a lawyer, we had agents, and they knew that this movie was kind of a hot commodity and everybody was interested in it. But not a lot of people had seen it.
At that first screening, all of us were there: Dan and me and Robin [Cowie, producer] and Gregg and Mike [Monello, producer], our lawyer, our agents, almost everybody that was part of the movie that could get a ticket to get in there.
We got there, and Blair Witch had been sold out for weeks. There was a big, long line just to wait for some tickets that maybe people didn’t use. And so the movie showed. We did a little Q&A. It was like one in the morning and, almost two in the morning when we got a call that Artisan wanted to get us going on a deal.The negotiation went on throughout the night. And Dan and I went away. We were like, ‘If we’re not in the room, then the other guys have at least somebody to say, “hey, we got a call.” They can’t be pressured into saying yes without checking with us, just as an excuse to walk away from the table.
It was a few hours – seven or whatever in the morning – they were like, ‘Hey, we sold it. We got this.’ And they said, ‘Are you guys cool with these things?’ And they told us like how much money and all that stuff. And we were like, ‘Of course.’
So the next day, we were the first movie to sell. There’s a lot of buzz. Sundance added another showing of the movie. Like you were saying, it really was a pinch me moment. And little did we know what was coming after that. For us, if the movie had just done Sundance and then had a modest video release, we would have been really happy. Our dreams would have come true just to have a movie that goes to Sundance and gets sold. We did interviews with these magazines we’d been reading since we were kids. It’s a dream come true, man.
So that first Sundance experience, I think of nothing but like really positive stuff. It was overwhelming, but in a really good way, you know?
[After Sundance, The Blair Witch Project, thanks to some ingenious viral marketing, became one of the biggest hits of 1999. Released that July, it grossed almost $250m worldwide. In the aftermath, however, Artisan rushed out a sequel, Book Of Shadows (2000), without any involvement from Sanchez or Myrick. In 2003, Lionsgate acquired Artisan, and now owns the rights to the Blair Witch IP. Sanchez and Myrick were loosely involved with a 2016 sequel, simply called Blair Witch. In April 2024, Lionsgate and Blumhouse announced that Blair Witch is to be rebooted. Neither the makers nor the cast of the 1999 film were told in advance.]
How do you feel about what happened next? It became a franchise, which is still going – Blumhouse is making a new one. Is that bittersweet? Do you sort of feel like you should have been able to continue it, or are you quite philosophical about it?
Daniel Myrick: Yeah, it’s always a little bittersweet. I mean, Ed and I have always had subsequent ideas that expand on the universe and the world that was created for Blair. We’ve always thought that there’s a lot to mine in that whole universe. Right after Blair’s success, Artisan wanted to go right into making another movie. They were in the process of like their IPO and they wanted to do a sequel, because it was hot and the hype was still going. And we felt it was a little too soon. But that, right on the heels of Sundance, was a rude awakening for us on how the business works.
Studios are not your friends. They’re a business, and so we learned a trial by fire in that regard. After that, it’s just the way the business operates. I mean, Lionsgate picked up the rights. They’ve made a couple of attempts at follow-up films that have been moderately successful, but we still hold on to the naive notion that there’s other Blair movies to explore that we feel would be valuable. Certainly to the audience, to the fans. Unfortunately, Lionsgate just hasn’t embraced that approach.
They’re the ones with the money. They’re the ones with the rights to the movie. So they’re going to do what they want to do. But I never say never. If they come out with another film, I’m hoping it’s not another found footage version. But we’ll see. It’s their ball, so they get to play with it however they want. But yeah, we haven’t really been consulted on any of it. And we’ve certainly let it be known that we’re here if they want to touch base with us again.
Maybe they had an argument early on that they wanted to go their own route and capitalise on the found footage thing, but it seems to me that even from an economic standpoint, it would be great marketing for them to reconnect with the original filmmakers, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards right now. So who knows? We’ll see.
Eduardo Sanchez: Like Dan said, it is bittersweet. We still love the IP and we’ve been thinking about it for more than 25 years now. And again, we don’t expect to write and direct these movies. We understand how Hollywood works and they’re always looking for the shiny new object, the new filmmaker. And there’s a lot of super talented people out there that can make a great Blair Witch movie.
But, just to be included… they included us in the 2016 version. And to be included again would be nice. Even if they don’t listen to us. Just to pick our brains – and again, like Dan was saying, we have a little bit of a fan base that’s dedicated to the original movie and it would be good press for them to bring us back in. But, we’ll see what happens. I’m not sure where they’re at with the movie, but, like Dan said, we’re here and we’re around if they want to chat.
[Actors Heather Donahue, Michael Williams and Joshua Leonard have long said that they only received $100,000 each for their appearance in the original film – a sum they received after suing Lionsgate in 2004. Their names and faces have remained indelibly connected to what is now a multi-million dollar franchise, however, and in April 2024, the three wrote an open letter to Lionsgate, arguing that they deserved residual compensation from the franchise’s profits. Sanchez and Myrick, as well as The Blair Witch Project’s three producers, all signed a joint statement supporting the actors.]
Did Lionsgate ever respond to your open letter from April? The one you and the actors wrote to Lionsgate.
Eduardo Sanchez: It [the open letter] was basically from the actors. And since we had a different kind of business relationship with the whole Blair Witch thing – we were part of the partnership, the ownership of it – we have to be really careful as far as how we present the argument. But we supported the actors completely. I chatted with Mike earlier this week and they are talking to Blumhouse and Lionsgate in some way, and they are making some progress. They still have no idea what is exactly going to happen, but at least they’re talking, which is great.
Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, thank you very much.
The Blair Witch Project Limited Edition 2-disc Blu-ray will release on the 11th November, and can be pre-ordered now.
—Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
