In October of 1997, three young actors went into the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, to play in a horror movie. Twenty-two months later, their film was a smash...and the talk not just of Hollywood but of America. You could hardly walk down a bustling street last week or log on to a website without tripping over that ominous incantation "Blair Witch." The impact, sudden and seismic, of The Blair Witch Project is utterly unprecedented. Never has a--let's be honest--weird movie budgeted at a ludicrously low $35,000 stormed both the box office and the national pop consciousness. In its first week of wide release, on 1,101 screens, it earned $50 million--more than the Julia Roberts comedy hit Runaway Bride, which played in nearly three times as many venues. It is likely to have the highest percentage of profit in film history. Its astounding success has made indie-film heroes of its directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. And the marketers at Artisan Entertainment, who built fervid want-see for the film through cunning use of the Internet, have been credited with revolutionizing the way films are sold.
Money and marketing are just part of the lure. This minimalist horror film, which appears to be a self-filmed documentary of three filmmakers who get lost in the Maryland woods while tracking down a local witch legend, has become the Elvis, the E.T., the Pet Rock of 1999--the hottest item in a hot summer. Shagadelic--what's that? Jar Jar Binks--remind me. Ricky Martin--isn't he Dino's kid? For this moment (and treasure it, because it may vanish as fast as it materialized), Blair Witch is the must-attend social event for plugged-in America.
Faced with this out-of-nowhere phenomenon, Hollywood cheers and shudders. Any movie that scares up business is considered good for the rest of the industry. But this one became a hit by breaking too many rules. No-star indie films usually make money with charm and sentiment; Blair Witch has neither. So the mass audience will accept something strident, elliptical, confrontational--what next? The movie was shot with its actors' being put through an eight-day survival game. They shot the film and made up the dialogue while the directors lurked out of sight and played sneaky tricks on them. Don't let James Cameron hear about this!
If the product was eccentric, so was the peddling, what Artisan co-president Amir Malin calls "guerrilla marketing tactics." Blair Witch's creative team, known as Haxan Films, hustled the movie's clips onto John Pierson's Split Screen cable show, premiered its trailer on the insider Ain't It Cool News website and launched its own site, www.blairwitch.com which, on an eventual investment of $15,000, had racked up 75 million hits by week's end. If Artisan can create an avid audience on cable and in cyberspace, why is Fox or Warner Bros. spending tens of millions advertising in the papers and on prime time? No wonder Hollywood, looking at Blair Witch, says both Wow! and Uh-oh!