Horror director Eli Roth has said that he too took inspiration from Blair Witch to market his first film Cabin Fever. In the end, you could say that The Blair Witch Project was the first film to “go viral” despite being released years before YouTube and social media platforms.
This film is one of the first successful attempts at viral marketing, spurring generations of influence not only in the film industry but commerce in general. Even IMDb-a reliable and widely used source of film information-was in on it, falsely listing the actors as “missing and presumably dead.” To add to the realism, when the film premiered before its commercial release at the Florida Film Festival, the filmmakers passed out fliers asking anyone who had information about the missing persons to please come forward. The site launched in 1998, one year before the movie’s release, and by August 1999, the website had garnered 160 million views.
This was achieved by launching a website loaded with fake newspaper clippings, police reports, documents and staged interviews regarding the legend of the Blair Witch and the disappearance of the students. In order to sell this movie, they had to convince the public that it was real, that the events on the screen were as verbatim as the home movies in their video collection. Executive producer Kevin Foxe consulted with public relations company Clein & Walker, and the advice was to create a hoax. We thought that three people actually went out into the woods and got killed by a witch, and that the movie ticket we were buying was for their actual, real life footage.īoth the critical and commercial success of The Blair Witch Project was due to the brilliant and innovative efforts of the marketing team. This was because we all thought it was real.
The Blair Witch Project was the talk of the town when I was in high school.
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