How ‘The Blair Witch Project’ revolutionized movie marketing

In the beginning was the Word — or, as they call it in Hollywood, word of mouth.

For as long as there have been movies, studio marketers have relentlessly pursued ways to get people to talk about them. Whether through grabby trailers, glowing reviews or the water-cooler recommendations of satisfied audiences, word of mouth was the engine that could organically turn a little-known film into a sleeper hit through the power of communal buzz.

In the 1990s, the explosive growth of the internet promised to supercharge this engine into a high-speed, global force, extending the reach of movie marketing campaigns into uncharted corners of what was still being quaintly called “cyberspace.” But at a time i when the concept of virality was still confined to infectious diseases, it took a low-budget, under-the-radar horror movie called “The Blair Witch Project” to wake up the industry to this new tool’s full revolutionary potential.

The 1999 Project

All year we’ll be marking the 25th anniversary of pop culture milestones that remade the world as we knew it then and created the world we live in now. Welcome to The 1999 Project, from the Los Angeles Times.

Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez on a shoestring budget of $60,000, “Blair Witch” purported to be not a fictional story but the actual footage found in camcorders left behind by three young filmmakers who disappeared in the Maryland woods in 1994 while making a documentary about a mythical local hermit who abducted and slaughtered children. When “Blair Witch” premiered at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, the film’s cast of unknowns — who had used their real names in the movie — were listed as either “missing” or “deceased.”

Snapping up the film’s distribution rights for $1.1 million, Artisan Entertainment set about creating a guerrilla-style marketing campaign that would further blur the line between what was real and what was not. Lacking the deep pockets of a major studio to run costly TV ads, the marketing team at Artisan launched a website two months before the film’s release that expanded the “Blair Witch” mythology with fictional police reports, newspaper articles and interviews.

John Hegeman, Artisan’s head of marketing, was a true believer in the potential of the internet, having set up the first promotional movie website for the 1994 sci-fi film “Stargate.” Whereas a traditional studio movie marketing campaign could easily run to $25 million or more, Hegeman recognized that the internet could get the word out to an even wider audience, at just a fraction of the cost of print and TV ads.

John Hegeman, who created the viral buzz around “The Blair Witch Project” for Artisan Entertainment, pictured in 1999.

(Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)

“There are a lot of other ways to get to people other than throwing money at them,” Hegeman told The Times in a 1999 interview, noting that the film’s total pre-release marketing spending came to just $1.5 million. “When people say something can’t be done, that in itself is motivation enough to say, ‘Yes, it can.’”

Within weeks of its launch, the “Blair Witch” site, which was regularly updated to stoke the mystery, was racking up 3 million hits a day. Artisan extended the unsettling marketing campaign with documentary-style trailers that featured stark, hand-held footage accompanied by frightened voices and screams. Young interns at the company were deployed to cafes and dance clubs around the country to ask people what they knew about the supposed legend of the Blair Witch, armed with realistic-looking “missing” posters for the film’s three stars.

By the time “Blair Witch” was released in July 1999, anticipation had reached a fever pitch — and the rest of Hollywood had taken notice. Jim Fredrick, professor of entertainment marketing at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, was senior vice president of creative advertising at Warner Bros. at the time and remembers marveling at the amount of buzz the indie distributor was able to generate through its grassroots campaign.

“The whole concept of found footage and making it a question of ‘Is this real or not?’ was just ingenious,” Fredrick says. “At any major studio, you’ve got big marketing budgets and you’re using research and testing things. Artisan didn’t have those tools or the money, so they had to figure out other ways — and lo and behold, here’s this thing called the internet and it’s incredibly cheap, if not free. These guys fooled the world, like Orson Welles with [the 1938 radio drama] ‘The War of the Worlds,’ and it became a phenomenon.”

Respected documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger was hired to direct the Blair Witch Project sequel. Behind him is an image of the woods from the movie.

(Bruce Gilbert / For The Times)

Opening in just 27 theaters, “Blair Witch” proved an instant sensation with audiences, earning a staggering $56,000 per screen, despite reports that some audience members vomited from the mix of fear and motion sickness caused by the film’s shaky footage. By the end of its theatrical run, the movie had expanded to more than 2,000 theaters and grossed nearly $250 million worldwide, over 4,000 times its original budget, making it one of the most profitable independent films of all time.

As the “Blair Witch” filmmakers worked to expand the film into a multimedia franchise including books, comics, video games and a sequel, others in Hollywood tried to emulate its formula. In the years that followed, movies like “Cloverfield,” “Paranormal Activity” and “The Last Exorcism” would borrow the found-footage concept with varying degrees of success. But recapturing the lightning-in-a-bottle cultural phenomenon of “Blair Witch” proved difficult as audiences grew more savvy to such marketing trickery.

“I can’t remember a horror movie I worked on after 1999 where the producer didn’t say, ‘Can’t you do for me what they did for “Blair Witch”?’” says Fredrick. “It’s very frustrating to have to tell the producer, ‘No, you don’t understand — we can’t repeat history here.’ The public has gotten very smart and they’re very hard to trick. You’re talking about the stars aligning in a way that may never be repeated again.”

Still, though it may have proven difficult to replicate, “Blair Witch” offered a proof of concept of the power of internet-based marketing, prompting studios to look for innovative ways to reach audiences through interactive digital campaigns and shared experiences rather than traditional media outlets. More broadly, it helped usher in a new era of pop culture in which the lines between reality and fiction would grow ever murkier.

A quarter century later, Fredrick says even the young students in his film marketing course, who were born in the smartphone era, recognize the pivotal moment “Blair Witch” represented.

“Every semester, I have an assignment for students to present a case study of their favorite marketing campaign, and every semester someone pulls out ‘Blair Witch,’” he says. “Even though they weren’t alive when the movie came out, they’re impressed — and kind of astounded — by the gullibility of people believing this was real. That’s a real nod to just how effective ‘Blair Witch’ was. People love unwinding a mystery.”