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Then there's Blair Witch. It has no sex or even sexual tension, no music of any kind, no demonic power tools. No prowling, voyeuristic camera from the killer's point of view; this movie is all about victims and the victims they make of each other. There are no shock cuts to the monster. In fact, no visible monster! Because the audience sees only what the camera does. At night it is sometimes pitch-black; for excruciating minutes, we are literally in the dark. The physical mayhem is limited to one conk on the head. There's no slashing--except of everything extraneous to the creation of psychological disorder. Blair Witch tweaks Mies van der Rohe's dictum into "Less is morbid" and makes the viewer collaborate actively in both the scenario and the scariness. Says Sanchez: "Horror is something that works in the viewer's mind, not really onscreen."
Myrick and Sanchez had tried to cast their main characters for two years before finding Donahue, Leonard and Williams. They gave the actors a 35-page plot outline and a lesson or two in handling a camera. Josh got an old CP-16-mm film camera. "We showed him how to load it and how not to destroy it," says Myrick. "But he treated it like a boat anchor anyway." Heather was given a High-8 video camera. The directors bought the High-8 for $500 at Circuit City. After the shooting, they returned it and got a refund.
For eight days and nights in autumn 1997, the actors were effectively on their own. They shot all the footage, as their characters were putatively doing, and invented their dialogue. Says Myrick: "We took the Method approach to the acting and the filming over eight straight days, 24-7." The directors were usually out of sight and hearing from their stars. Each day they would leave notes in a box for each actor; they gave general instructions--clues, really--on what to do. If Mike were to confess he'd jettisoned the map, the others wouldn't know until he said it. And at night, when the actors were in their tent, says Sanchez, "we'd go out on our raids and scare them--wake them up, leave things behind. We basically played the Blair Witch."
At the end, they had 20 hours of footage. Their plan had been to follow that with the "documentary" scenes and, says Sanchez, "treat the footage almost as if it were real. But it turned out to be just so real." Suddenly they had a faux cinema verite thriller. "We knew it was different, and a risk. But as rough and as raw as it was, we knew we should leave it alone." They had their movie. They trimmed the woods footage--"It was like we wrote the script during the editing," Myrick says--and used the other material for a devious docu-promo, Curse of the Blair Witch, that ran on the Sci-Fi Channel.