The creators of The Blair Witch Project Fanatic's Guide, for example, tell site visitors, "We're just very dedicated fans," and until recently offered suggestions on how other fans might help promote the movie: "Buy TBWP Stock at the Hollywood Stock Exchange! Rank TBWP at the Internet Movie Database! Rank TBWP at Ain't It Cool News!"īut the creators of the site, Abigail Marceluk and Eric Alan Ivins, seem to be more than average fans. The "Blair Witch Project" fan sites deploy similarly suspicious language. And in fairness, when I asked, Universal denied any involvement." Poland's insider column for TNT's Rough Cut, The Hot Button, frequently serves as a reality check for the Hollywood hype machine. But I don't have any doubt that site was put up by somebody from Universal," says David Poland. "You never quite know who the hand is - the filmmaker, the studio. But wouldn't those purchase order numbers - clearly visible on the purloined files - give Universal a good idea of which employee had leaked it? And would a fan really create a scrolling credits area, playing up the film's writer, director and producers - and pausing to add "In theaters July 9th"? Many believe that deceptive cyberspace marketing is the movie industry's latest secret weapon in the campaign to take that opening weekend by storm.Ī fan site for American Pie boasts an electronic counter labeled "Days UNIVERSAL Hasn't Shut Us Down" as well as a disclaimer that "I scammed some stuff of this movie off friends that work for a movie company in CA and posted some clips up on the net." OK. But whether or not people involved with "The Blair Witch Project" have been seeding the Net with faux-amateurish fan sites or writing pseudonymous reviews of the movie, such practices seem to be increasingly popular in Hollywood. What happened is that they tricked the press."įilmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez declined to be interviewed for this story. "'The Blair Witch Project' filmmakers are using their friends to generate their fan sites," says another industry executive point-blank. And it's available to those with limited resources. Marketing at New Line Cinema, "is the most inexpensive and efficient mode of marketing around.
"Internet marketing," notes Gordon Paddison, director of interactive Before it even opened, the indie had inspired over 20 fan sites, a mailing list, a Web ring, a Usenet group - and more than its fair share of glowing reports on the influential movie site Ain't It Cool News.
Project," a low-budget horror film that's generated more buzz than the chainsaw used in that Texas massacre. If you’ve ever found yourself furious for having spent money to see any of the braindead Saw or Paranormal activity films, you probably have Myrick and Sanchez to blame.One of the hottest topics on the Net this summer is "The Blair Witch It may not hold up as a particularly “great” film, but the impact it has had on the industry is astounding. Sifting through the “evidence” remains chilling. While The Blair Witch Project‘s website now prominently features a link to purchase the film on DVD, it still contains much of the initial campaign that set out to appeal to the same youth market that turned Jaws into such a massive success. The Blair Witch Project‘s profitability can be attributed to an unblinking marketing campaign that set out to turn it into a successful documentary, not a traditional horror film. Unlike previous Sundance success stories like Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs or Kevin Smith’s Clerks, however, the critics are not what made the film.
It succeeded because it managed to pass as real.ĭirected by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, The Blair Witch project is a pseudo-documentary made by three film students attempting to investigate a fake legend that haunts the woods surrounding the real town Burkitsville, Maryland. Like many successful independent features, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews. It was not a success because it had better effects than its high-budget studio counterparts. In 1999, Artisan released The Blair Witch Project, an extremely low-budget horror film that managed to overshadow just about any scary movie that came before it.
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