The movie was set to debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1999 when a last-minute decision was made to scrap basically half the film.
"There’s a lot of folklore that surrounds the small towns that we sort of drew from.” “And Maryland had the right sort of vibe and look, it has a lot of history, Civil War history, Native American history," he says. “Blair Witch” was shot in Maryland, Myrick remembers, primarily because it enabled them to save money by setting up headquarters in Sanchez’s girlfriend’s townhouse. “At the time, we thought nothing of it," says Myrick. Many horrific things, at least in the imagination of the two directors, happened there over the years. Burkittsville’s original name, according to the movie’s mythology, was Blair. There were also a few bits of footage shot in Burkittsville, about 12 miles west of Frederick, which Myrick and Sánchez had chosen as the movie’s setting. Most of it was filmed in Montgomery County’s Seneca Creek State Park, although the final scenes were shot at a dilapidated old house in Patapsco State Park (known as the Griggs House and dating to the early 19th century, it has since been demolished). The movie was shot over eight days in October 1997. Certainly, the pair thought, they could do better than this. As students in the film program at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, they were looking for a film project when they attended a preview screening of 1991′s “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare,” an entry in the“Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise. Myrick and Sanchez agree that “The Blair Witch Project” arose from their shared love of horror movies. People remember it as an event, which is pretty neat to be a part of.” “It was an event movie, where people are always telling me the story of where they saw it, what happened right after it, how they went into the woods and they were going camping, or how they lived in a house that was creepy, and they never went to the basement again. Williams, now 46 and in his 10th year as a middle school guidance counselor in Westchester County, N.Y. “It’s pretty humbling to talk about it, 20 years later,” says cast member Michael C. Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams in "The Blair Witch Project." (UNKNOWN)Ī horror-movie phenomenon was born. In the film’s most famous (and most relentlessly parodied) scene, one of the three, a terrified Heather (played by actress Heather Donahue the actors’ and characters’ names are the same), turns the camera on herself, tearfully apologizing for having put everyone in harm’s way like this.Ĭalling the movie an “exhilarating return to the roots of cinematic horror,” former Baltimore Sun movie critic Ann Hornaday, in her July 1999 review, praised “Blair Witch,” awarding it four stars and saying it “packs an emotional wallop entirely disproportionate to its meager pedigree.” Other critics followed suit (though not everyone: sniffed Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter, “The viewer never glimpses anything more than the shadow of a clever movie”), directors Sanchez and Myrick appeared on the cover of Time (with the cast making the cover of Newsweek), its directors and producers won an Independent Spirit Award. Having set out to make a film about the Blair Witch, which legend has it lurks in the woods around the Frederick County town of Burkittsville, killing people and devouring their bodies, they encounter strange sounds and mysterious stick figures, get hopelessly lost and discover, to their (and our) growing horror, that the witch’s reputation is richly deserved. Purportedly footage shot by the three young filmmakers and discovered after they disappeared, “The Blair Witch Project" chronicles the trio’s last days. Eduardo Sanchez, left, and Daniel Myrick, co-directors of "The Blair Witch Project," in 1999.
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