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That material also got onto the website, designed by Sanchez. Rarely have outtakes proved so useful. They helped create a Blair world of almost Tolkienian density. "You could get into the spirit of the folklore we created without having to see the movie," Sanchez says, "or vice versa." The folklore also served as fodder for the book (No. 10 on the Amazon.com list), the comic book and, yes, the CD of songs found in the tape deck of Josh's car. Now fess up, that's stretching synergy. But everything has worked so far for the good-guy directors, who sounded most excited about a wager they'd just collected on. They'd bet Artisan that if Blair Witch did $10 million, they'd get a new Foosball table. It arrived in Orlando this week.
Now that their first feature is headed for $100 million at the domestic box office, Myrick and Sanchez have just one sure thing ahead of them: the sophomore jinx. They describe their next film, a comedy called Heart of Love, as "Mad Mad Mad World meets Monty Python meets Airplane! meets the stupidest movie you've ever seen." Could it tank? Of course--like most indie or studio films. "We know we're gonna bomb," says Sanchez. "We're gonna live with that bomb and nurture it and then watch it explode."
They seem to realize that the flip side of phenomenon is fluke. Blair Witch, a film that antagonizes as many folks as it enthralls, could be as fleeting a fad as Deely Bobbers, and with no profound meaning for the future of film--except perhaps that struggling filmmakers with a marketable attitude will for a short, happy time be overpaid by studio bosses hoping against reason for another Blair Witch.
"There's no good lesson to learn here," says Pierson, the indie guru whose cable show helped get the Blair rolling. "It's not an independent-film phenomenon. What you really have is a convergence of old and new media." And a film that blends the thrill of the unseen with the art of the sell. That's true Witch craft.
--Reported by Georgia Harbison/New York, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles with other bureaus
Talk online with Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, the directors of The Blair Witch Project, Wednesday, Aug. 11 at 8 p.m. E.T. on chat.yahoo.com/time