In the beginning there was a word, which in Hollywood is called word of mouth.
For as long as movies have existed, movie marketers have relentlessly sought ways to get people talking about their films. Whether it be an attention-grabbing trailer, a glowing review, or a chilling recommendation from a satisfied audience member, word of mouth has been the driving force behind turning a little-known movie into an organic hit through the power of community buzz.
In the 1990s, the explosive growth of the Internet powered this engine into a high-velocity, global force, extending movie marketing campaigns into the uncharted territory then quaintly called “cyberspace.” But at a time when the concept of virality was still limited to infectious diseases, it took a low-budget, little-known horror film called “The Blair Witch Project” to awaken the industry to the revolutionary potential of this new tool.
1999 Projects
Welcome to the Los Angeles Times 1999 Project, where we’ll be celebrating the 25th anniversary of pop culture milestones that reshaped the world then and shaped the world we know today, all year long.
Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez on a budget of just $60,000, “Blair Witch” is not a fictional story but is purportedly based on actual footage left behind on video cameras by three young filmmakers who went missing in 1994 while making a documentary about a legendary hermit who allegedly kidnapped and massacred children in the woods of Maryland. When “Blair Witch” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999, the unnamed cast members who used real names in the film were listed as “missing” or “deceased.”
Artisan Entertainment acquired the distribution rights to the film for $1.1 million and began developing a guerilla-style marketing campaign that further blurred the line between reality and fiction. Lacking the funds to run expensive television ads like the major studios, Artisan’s marketing team launched a website two months before the film’s release and expanded the “Blair Witch” mythos with fictional police reports, newspaper articles, and interviews.
Artisan’s head of marketing, John Hegeman, was a true believer in the potential of the Internet, having launched the first promotional movie website for the sci-fi film Stargate in 1994. While a traditional studio movie marketing campaign could easily run $25 million or more, Hegeman realized that the Internet could reach a much wider audience at a fraction of the cost of print or TV advertising.
John Hegeman, star of Artisan Entertainment’s “The Blair Witch Project,” in 1999.
(Lawrence K. Ho/Los Angeles Times)
“There are a lot of ways to win people’s hearts and minds other than throwing money at them,” Hegeman told The Times in a 1999 interview, noting that the film’s pre-release marketing budget totaled just $1.5 million. “When people say you can’t do something, that’s an incentive in itself to say, ‘You can.'”
Within weeks of its release, the “Blair Witch” website, regularly updated to stoke the mystery, was getting 3 million hits a day. Artisan ran a marketing campaign to stoke anxiety with documentary-style trailers that mixed gruesome handheld footage with sounds of terrified screams and screams. The company’s young interns were sent out to cafes and dance clubs around the country, asking people what they knew about the Blair Witch legend while creating realistic “missing” posters of the film’s three stars.
By the time “Blair Witch” was released in July 1999, anticipation was at a fever pitch, and the rest of Hollywood was taking notice. Jim Frederick, a professor of entertainment marketing at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, who was senior vice president of creative advertising at Warner Bros. at the time, remembers being astonished by the amount of buzz the indie distributor had generated through its grassroots campaign.
“The concept of found footage and questioning it with, ‘Is this real?’ was really original,” Frederick says. “Major studios have big marketing budgets and they do research and testing. Artisan didn’t have those tools or the money, so they had to find another way. And lo and behold, there was this thing called the Internet, which, while not free, was incredibly cheap. They fooled the world the way Orson Welles fooled the world with his movies.” [the 1938 radio drama] ‘War of the Worlds’ became a phenomenon.”
Renowned documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger has been tapped to direct the sequel to The Blair Witch Project, with footage of the forest featured in the film standing behind him.
(Bruce Gilbert/The Times)
Released in just 27 theaters, Blair Witch became an instant sensation among audiences, grossing an astounding $56,000 per screen, despite reports that some audience members vomited from fear and motion sickness caused by the film’s shaky images. By the end of its theatrical run, the film had played in over 2,000 theaters and grossed approximately $250 million worldwide, more than 4,000 times its original budget and making it one of the highest-grossing independent films of all time.
As the makers of “Blair Witch” worked to expand the film into a multimedia franchise, including books, comics, video games and sequels, other Hollywood movies tried to copy the formula. In the years that followed, films like “Cloverfield,” “Paranormal Activity” and “The Last Exorcism” borrowed from the found-footage concept with varying degrees of success. But replicating the cultural phenomenon that was “Blair Witch” proved difficult, as audiences grew increasingly accustomed to the marketing gimmicks.
“There hasn’t been a single horror movie I’ve worked on since 1999 that a producer hasn’t said, ‘Can you do what we did with Blair Witch?'” Frederick says. “It’s very frustrating to have to say to a producer, ‘No, you don’t get it. We can’t let history repeat itself here.’ The public has gotten very wise and it’s very hard to fool. It’s a story of the stars aligning in a way that may never be repeated again.”
Yet while “Blair Witch” may have been difficult to replicate, it served as a proof-of-concept for the power of internet-based marketing, inspiring studios to explore innovative ways to reach audiences not through traditional media vehicles, but through interactive digital campaigns and shared experiences. More broadly, the film helped usher in a new era of pop culture in which the line between reality and fiction is increasingly blurred.
A quarter century later, Frederick says even the young students in his film marketing course, born in the smartphone era, recognize the seminal moment that “Blair Witch” represented.
“Every semester I assign my students to present a case study of their favorite marketing campaign, and every semester someone brings up ‘Blair Witch,'” he says. “They’re impressed and kind of amazed at the gullibility of people who believe this is real, even though they weren’t alive when the movie came out. That just goes to show how effective ‘Blair Witch’ was. People love to solve mysteries.”