They created a fake documentary film about the Blair witch called Curse of the Blair Witch that aired on the SciFi Channel in 1999 prior to the actual film’s release. The film’s marketing strategy was to first create a belief in the Blair witch story in the popular consciousness. The two directors came up with the idea in film school after deciding that they both found paranormal documentary films to often be more scary than the traditional horror film, so they decided to mix the two forms together. Though certainly not the first film, nor even the first horror film, to use the technique, Blair Witch is considered the film to have popularized it. In the original pitch video for the movie, shown on John Pierson's show Split Screen in 1997, narration explains how 'sections of the Black Hills area are lost in time' and 'once entered, there is no way out.Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s 1999 independent horror film The Blair Witch Project is best known for its use of the found-footage film technique.

In fact, time warps were part of the Blair Witch lore before the film had even been shot. It's an idea that connects to events in 2016's Blair Witch film, which wasn't made by the original filmmakers, but it's actually a concept long-supported by Blair Witch canon. This causes them to hike in circles, leading them to a time when Parr's house is still standing, and it was Parr who killed Heather there while ordering Mike to stand in the corner. So how did it get there? The time warp theory contends that Heather, Mike and Josh hiked into an area of the woods where time is altered. David Mercer, the archaeology professor who led his class to the site, explains that 'even a forensic expert' could not have placed those items without leaving signs of disturbance. There's also the strange fact that the filmmakers' equipment and footage was found in the colonial-era foundations of a burned-down house. They also draw attention to Heather referring to a portion of the Bible Brown quoted offscreen, 'which warns against crossing a boundary demarcated by stones.' Others contend that Mary Brown, the strange woman interviewed at the start of the film, is one of these people, as the wooden gate to her mobile home looks similar to both the stick figures and the bundle of Josh's teeth. In a deleted scene included on the Blair Witch DVD release, Josh proposes that locals they encountered in town during filming are making a 'game' of stalking the team, and that this is the cause of the strange incidents.įans of this theory suggest Mike is standing in the corner at the film's end because he's being held at gunpoint by an unseen person, while Heather is knocked out and murdered.

Josh replies: 'You ever seen Deliverance?' He's referring to the 1972 film in which a group of men are stalked in the woods by deranged locals. 'Nobody knows we're out here,' she tells him. After two nights in the woods, Heather and Josh discuss the unexplained sounds they've been hearing at night. One theory suggests the filmmakers are actually victims of the Burkittsville townspeople. The footage comes from the 1969 'documentary' White Enamel, also fictional, that documents abuses committed at the institute. She briefly describes what happened there, and mentions that the faces of the murdered search party were inscribed with 'indecipherable writing, cut into their flesh with an eerie precision.' The writing is also seen in The Burkittsville 7, written by an adult Kyle Brody while incarcerated at the Maryland State Institute for the Criminally Insane. They'd been looking for Robin Weaver, who claims she was lured away by a supernatural woman to a house she managed to escape from.Ĭoffin Rock is one of Heather's filming locations.

'They had been disemboweled, and on their faces, their hands and feet, were carved these strange pagan symbols,' according to Charles Moorehouse, credited as professor of folklore from Maryland State University. In Blair Witch mythology, Coffin Rock is the site where a search party sent out after a missing girl in 1886 were brutally murdered. The letters also pop up in the special The Curse of the Blair Witch, during the tale of Coffin Rock.

Blair witch 1999