Did you fall for it?

Discussing the ways in which The Blair Witch Project uses advertising, marketing, merchandise and ‘tie ins’ to appeal to a target audience

The Blair Witch Project (dir. Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999) used the idea of the film being a real documentary for marketing, relying on the audience’s fascination with mysteries and the growing use of the internet during the 90s. The target audiences were teenagers and young adults, people who could relate to the missing students, this was the demographic who were using the internet the most at the time

A website, blairwitch.com, was launched to advertise the film, it was used to immerse people in the world of the film’s protagonists. The website was broken up into four sections, mythology, film-makers, aftermath and legacy, each section was used to convince people that the Blair Witch and the tragedies that came along with her were real. The mythology section created the myth of the Witch, with an extensive history going back to 1785, entries around this date being incredibly similar to the real Salem witch trials. The history used real town names and had supporting information with links to newspaper articles, old pictures and artefacts belonging to the missing film-makers, all these things making the myth seem more believable. The film-makers and legacy sections were used to humanise the missing students, the film-makers section filled with ‘the most recent’ pictures of them before they went ‘missing’. The aftermath section was filled with crime scene photos and expert interviews, making the disappearances seem very real. The website and missing person blogs were constantly being updated with bits of information about the missing students and calls for aid to maintain the film’s “poker-face illusion” (Carvell). The website had constant updates which allowed people to believe that they were discovering things about the Witch and the disappearances for themselves, keeping them interested in The Blair Witch Project. For those who realised that the film was not a documentary, the website added to the immersion, acting as a form of world-building, expanding on the lore of the Blair Witch, “The site was not an added-on marketing tool but was designed as part of the film experience” (Telotte, 2001).

Missing person posters of Heather (Rei Hance), Josh (Joshua Leonard) and Mike (Michael Williams) were originally posted around Burkittsville, Maryland, the location of the film’s setting. The area where they were posted slowly grew and as it did the interaction on blairwitch.com also grew, with people wanting to learn more about the missing film-makers. After The Blair Witch Project’s premier at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, the same posters were put up around college campuses, compared to a wider audience, college students were more able to relate to the missing people as they were also students. This relatability led to greater concern and a want to find out more, in turn, this led to more visits to the website, immersing the audience into the world of the Blair Witch. To make the disappearances even more believable Hance, Leonard and Williams avoided being seen by the media while the film was being distributed and were listed as ‘missing, presumed dead’ on their IMDb pages.

Artisan Entertainment produced a short documentary named The Curse of the Blair Witch (dir. Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999), which briefly ran on the American Sci-Fi Channel before the film’s release, appealing to that channel’s specialised audience who were viewers of fantasy, horror and the paranormal. As well as targeting an audience, Artisan continued to build the story and world of the Blair Witch Project, with the documentary giving more details about the case and more interviews.

The scarcity of film viewing added to the buzz around the film, with it only being shown in twenty-seven cinemas on its opening weekend, and it made over twenty-five times its budget (Box Office Mojo). The marketing of The Blair Witch Project was incredibly influential as immersive websites have been created since the release of other films and shows, Netflix created websites for shows like LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS (dir. Tim Miller, 2019) and Dark (dir. Baran bo Odar, 2017). The film’s low advertising budget fitted with the low budget feel of the film, adding the ‘authenticity’ of the documentary.

Bibliography

Carvell, T. (1999) ‘How the Blair Witch Project Built Up So Much Buzz.’ Fortune. pp. 32-34

Telotte, J. P. (2001) ‘The Blair Witch Project Project: Film and the Internet’ Film Quarterly, Vol. 54, No.3. pp 32-39

Box Office Mojo (n.d.) The Blair Witch Project. Available from https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2269611521/. [Accessed 20th March 2022].

Filmography

Curse of the Blair Witch (1999) Directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick [Film] Artisan Entertainment

Dark (2017-2020) Directed by Baran bo Odar. Netflix

LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS (2019-present) Directed by Tim Miller. Netflix

The Blair Witch Project (1999) Directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick [Film] Artisan Entertainment