“Throughout editing the movie and building the website, we fleshed out the story of Rustin Parr, a serial killer in the ’40s who made one kid stand in the corner while he killed the other.
“That interview not in the original Sundance cut,” Sánchez said. It was only after the Sundance screening that the filmmakers added some subtle exposition, having an interview subject recount the back story of a killer making kids stand in the corner. We just came up with that ending like two days before we had to shoot it like, ‘Just stand in the corner, we’ll come up with a reason later.'” “We were flying by the seat of our pants. “When we shot the movie, we had no idea why Mike was standing in the corner,” Sánchez said. The entire film builds toward a climatic scene at an abandoned house in the woods, where Mike creepily stands facing the corner before Heather’s camera is knocked to the ground. Luckily for us, we cast the right people and they just dialed it up and just turned in these classic performances.” It was like a 24-hour play a day that lasted for about a week.
We played the Blair Witch, we did all the noises at night, we built the rock piles outside the house, all that stuff. … We would go out and set everything up for them. “A lot of times we were just at Chi-Chi’s eating,” Sánchez joked. “It was actually a really hectic schedule. What did Myrick and Sánchez do in the meantime? They had GPS to navigate their way through the park.” In the notes was not only character stuff but also logistical stuff, like you need to get Wave Point 3 by this time. “We gave them notes three or four times a day. “We basically gave them directing notes that they couldn’t show each other, Dan and I could surgically plant things as they moved along,” Sánchez said. It was the first time I’d ever met them I said, ‘Thank you so much for doing whatever you did!'”Īs the actors entered the woods, they were given cameras to film shaky handheld shots in a cinema verite style, improvising dialogue from a 35-page script outline and told to wave to the filmmakers at various stopping points. “This woman came out of nowhere and the kid acted perfectly! … We had an event called ‘The Blair Witch Experience’ Seneca Creek Park invited both of the women - the little girl is now grown. “That was a complete happy accident,” Sánchez said. While the filmmakers launched a grassroots marketing campaign behind the scenes, the legend is doled out on screen by a series of staged interviews with the local townspeople, including a young girl who is so spooked that she repeatedly covers her mother’s mouth. As they meet their demise, audiences are lead to believe we’re watching posthumous found footage. Of course, that’s not true - Burkittsville is an actual town, but it wasn’t built on this site.”īlurring fact and fiction like “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974) a generation earlier, “The Blair Witch Project” introduces a trio of student filmmakers, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams, who visit the woods to document the Blair Witch curse. … The town was cursed, the township of Blair was abandoned the town of Burkittsville was built on the site of Blair. “They accused a woman, Elly Kedward, of being a witch, they took her to the woods during a harsh winter, tied her to a tree and they thought she had frozen to death. “Basically, there was a township called Blair back in the 1700s,” Sánchez said. What exactly was the urban legend they invented? “So, we were like, ‘We’re gonna have to create this mythology just for the actress become an expert in the Blair Witch,’ which we were inventing.” “The whole premise of the movie was that this person Heather was obsessed with the Blair Witch mythology,” Sánchez said. One of the more underrated crew members was co-director Daniel Myrick’s wife Julia, who embraced the role of “history fabricator.” It was she who spearheaded the myth-building of the Blair Witch urban legend, planting fake stories on the internet, handing out “missing person” fliers and listing the actors as “missing” or “deceased” in the end credits. The screening will feature a red carpet and Q&A with Sánchez alongside actor Mike Williams, sound designer Tony Cora and producer Michael Monello.