Want to feel old? Of course not… But I’m going to make you feel that way, anyway: THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT came out a decade ago. No, really. It came out in limited release on JULY 16th, 1999, and went wide on JULY 30th. Let’s mull that over while glumly reaching for the Maker’s Mark…
In celebration – so to speak – of this reality, BBC News has written an interesting article going over what made the flick such a revelation – from its then-revolutionary marketing campaign, to the way it was made. It also gets into the filmmakers’ reaction to the backlash and their less-than-happy relationship to the ill-advised sequel. A sample from co-director Dan Myrick on this last point: “We felt a little betrayed because we wanted to let the Blair Witch hype die down a little because it was so out of control and there was a bit of a backlash… We felt that the story of that movie broke the mythology.”
More intriguing still is the fact that there’s still talk of yet another BLAIR WITCH sequel. Eduardo Sanchez acknowledges that a prequel was mulled over, but a direct follow-up might be the way to go: “We’ve thought about doing a film that takes place in the late 1700s and looks like a [Stanley] Kubrick movie with gritty looking people and lighting… But now, we’re thinking about going back and and seeing what happened directly after the first film finished. I think it will have some kind of video element in it, but it won’t be a first person hand-held movie.”
For the entire article, head on over HERE.
BLAIR WITCH 2 star Erica Leehrsen
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