Blair Witch
| Blair Witch | |
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| Creator |
Eduardo Sánchez Daniel Myrick |
| Original work | The Blair Witch Project |
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| Films | |
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Blair Witch is a horror film franchise distributed by Artisan Entertainment (now Lionsgate) and produced by Haxan Films that consists of three feature films and various merchandise products. The development of the franchise's first installment, The Blair Witch Project, started in 1993. The filmmakers Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick wrote a 35-page outline of a story with the dialogue to be improvised. Filming began in 1997 and lasted eight days. The film follows the disappearance of three student filmmakers in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary on the local legend known as the "Blair Witch".
After premiering at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, the film was released on 30 July 1999 after months of publicity during a controversial promotional campaign. The film went on to be a massive commercial success, and a sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, was released on October 27, 2000. A second sequel, Blair Witch, was released on September 16, 2016. Series of video games, books, novels and comic books were released to accompany the films.
The backstory for the movie is a faux legend fabricated by Sánchez and Myrick which is detailed in The Curse of the Blair Witch, a mockumentary broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel in 1999 prior to the release of the The Blair Witch Project. Sanchez and Myrick also maintained a website at BlairWitch.com which added further details to the legend. It is now the official site of the 2016 installment.
The fictional tale describes the murders and disappearances of some of the residents of Blair, Maryland (the fictitious former name of Burkittsville, Maryland) from the 18th century to the 20th century. According to the legend, residents always blame these occurrences on the ghost of Elly Kedward (also a fictitious person), a Blair resident executed in 1785 by exposure for practicing witchcraft. The mockumentary presents the legend as real, complete with manufactured newspaper articles, newsreels, television news reports, and staged interviews, all in an attempt to deceive viewers.
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Wikipedia