Overview

Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez's The Blair Witch Project seemingly appeared from nowhere to become one of 1999's highest grossing films. Whilst generating revenue as a low-budget movie backed by a media blitz, The Blair Witch Project also generated controversy and made a mockery of the Hollywood industry, billing itself as real footage of a supernatural event. Critics were divided over some of the most basic questions: whether the film was an artistic success or the product of its hype, for example, and whether it challenged Hollywood conventions or succumbed to them in the end. This text examines these and other debates and initiates some of its own about the American taste for horror, hoax, independent films, the Internet and the direction of cinema in the 21st century. It explores the modest origins and rapid demise of this independent film while also analysing the sensational results of its broad media discourses - a Web site developing the back story of The Blair Witch Project was one of the most-accessed sites on the Internet at the time of the film's release. These essays, written from diverse perspectives, also look at The Blair Witch Project's manipulation of cinematic codes, its view on technology and the occult, its film progenitors and even its effects on the film's setting of Burkittsville, Maryland. The text should be of interest to both film scholars and fans of this unexpected blockbuster that emerged from, if not nothing , then a complex brew of culture, technology and ingenuity.

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