Synopsis

Three student filmmakers enter Maryland's Black Hills Forest to document the legend of the Blair Witch. After losing their way, they discover unsettling signs that someone - or something - is tracking them. As their supplies dwindle and tensions rise, the project becomes a desperate record of fear, confusion, and survival, assembled from the footage left behind after their disappearance.

Factoids & Trivia

• The film was shot in roughly eight days, with the performers working continuously in the woods and operating the cameras themselves.

• Rather than following a conventional screenplay, the performers received story objectives and improvised much of the dialogue and action. Crew members used hidden instructions, surveillance, and staged disturbances to guide the production and provoke authentic reactions.

• The movie combines footage from a 16mm film camera and a Hi8 video camera. The different formats help distinguish the planned documentary material from the more personal recordings.

• The filmmakers and distributor supported the movie's premise with an early website containing fictional reports, interviews, and background material about the supposed disappearance. This was an unusually ambitious use of the early Internet for film promotion.

• Artisan Entertainment acquired the film after its 1999 Sundance screening for approximately $1 million, then expanded its release through an extensive publicity campaign that continued treating the disappearance as part of the mystery.

• With worldwide earnings reported at roughly $248 million, the film became one of the most commercially successful independent movies relative to its production cost.

• The Blair Witch is never clearly shown. The film instead builds its horror through sound, absence, suggestion, and the characters' increasingly unreliable understanding of their surroundings.

• The film helped bring found-footage horror into mainstream popularity and later expanded into sequels, books, comics, and video games.