ABSTRACT
“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. … A year later their footage was found.” With this line of text begins the fake documentary The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999), and from this beginning statement until the end of the film, the possibility that the footage was “found,” rather than constructed by filmmakers Myrick and Sanchez, is never denied. The film consists only of film and video footage supposedly shot by the three students: Michael Williams, Joshua Leonard, and Heather Donahue. (The characters’ names are, in fact, the names of the film’s actors and the actors did shoot most if not all of the footage used in the final film, which adds an extra layer of “reality” to the film.) Marketing material about the film as well as its associated website was ambiguously worded and suggested that the makers of The Blair Witch Project, Myrick and Sanchez, simply edited together into chronological order footage shot by Williams, Leonard, and Donahue. 1
