#Blair witch project budget how to#

#Blair witch project budget how to#

Nostalgia Demographic: Impressionable types who didn’t know how to Google in 1999, so mostly everyone. By a witch. Those were simpler, and scarier, times. No amount of news coverage (“The movie is fake! The cast is ALIVE!”) could convince some people that the girl they’d seen weeping into a hand-cam in those previews hadn’t been murdered. The film was one of the first to publicize itself with a stealth Internet campaign, part of what made many, many people believe that The Blair Witch Project - a faux docu about a team of missing paranormal investigators - was actual found footage (i.e., that the movie was a real documentary), and that the “students” in it had the wherewithal to film their own murder by a ghost-witch and get the whole thing in wide distribution. Back in 1999, the year it was released, the nation was in a bit of a Y2k techno-panic and not quite as reality-TV and Internet-savvy as it would soon become. The critically acclaimed The Blair Witch Project famously cost less than $1 million to make, and after finding distribution at Sundance, went on to make $248 million, spawning the found-footage craze we are still living through today. īackground: Before “found footage” was its own annoying genre convention (see: Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, The Last Exorcism, and most recently Chronicleand ABC’s The River, which premieres tonight), it was a pretty decent, brand-new, and very cheap ticket-selling gimmick. This week, we consider 1999’s The Blair Witch Project. Now, years later, we will take a look at these classics in a more objective, unforgiving adult light: Are they really the best ever? How do they hold up now? We’ve already reconsidered a number of once-beloved entertainments.

The Nostalgia Fact-Check is a recurring Vulture feature in which we revisit a seminal movie, TV show, or album that reflexively evinces an “Oh my God, that was the best ever!” response by a certain demographic, owing to it having been imprinted on them early.