Could "The Blair Witch Project" work in today's climate?

Hello everyone, my name is Jared. This post is different from some of the others because I’m going to be looking at what would happen if “The Blair Witch Project” was released today; if it would be believed, and if not, what they could do in order for it to be believable. If you don’t know, The Blair Witch Project is a movie about three college kids going into the woods to make a documentary. They are filming their documentary until everything starts to go haywire. I won’t spoil what happens but eventually, they are killed/lost. It’s shot entirely from their cameras, because of this, the movie was marketed as entirely real. While it’s hard for a movie that gets released to market itself as real and get away with it, The Blair Witch Project was the first movie to really market like this and have people believe it. In fact, most people did believe it at the time. They made fake news reports, documentaries about the “Blair Witch” and even had the actors lay low and not go in public to fully create the illusion. What I’ll be doing in this post is talking about what they could do to make people think this movie was real if it was to be released today.

Well from what I’ve noticed people are way less likely to believe something just because it said it’s real. I think due to the changes in the internet, creating false information and marketing it as real doesn’t really happen anymore. The best way to lie and create false information like that is using sites like twitter and reddit to make it appear as if you are just a family member trying to find your brother/sister/daughter/son rather than making it such a huge deal. That wouldn’t work because we can google anything and have the information in less than one second whereas back when The Blair Witch Project originally released you couldn’t do that. It was only really possible to know if it was true if you managed to find either people who lived around the area or somehow stumbled upon a website that debunked it. The best way for us to come to a conclusion on how to make The Blair Witch Project work nowadays is to understand that the original way would not work.

USING THE INTERNET TO ITS FULL POTENTIAL

The internet has changed our understanding of reality and of what’s real and what’s not. We can just as easily debunk something as we can make someone else think it’s real. The best way to use the internet nowadays is to use it to the advantage of the marketers. If I was in the distributors hands and wanted people to think this was real, what I would do is create a youtube channel. You post a video that features someone related to the person who is “lost”. You have them ask for help to find the missing person. Afterward when you want to “find the footage”, you can post a video of some of the footage and put text on the screen saying “If you or anyone you know has seen these people contact XXX-XXX-XXXX.” After that, you’ll more than likely have at least some people on your hook. Then comes the hardest part for your movie, getting your movie onto the big screen without people losing their trust in the “reality” of your film. The reason The Blair Witch Project was successful is because people didn’t lose that trust by the time they went into the theatre. When they went in, they were fully expecting that whatever was put in front of their face was real and not scripted (which the movie was half real and half scripted but that’s for a different time).

YOU CAN’T USE THE INTERNET? NOW WHAT?

If you couldn’t use the internet, I think honestly the best way to make your movie seem real is by simply releasing your movie with no marketing. I think it’s like with for example Texas chainsaw Massacre, it was pretty much only advertised as real. We know that it isn’t real but just simply by looking at it back then you would assume they’re telling you the truth. When they are actually just lying to you. If you were against not marketing (which most studios would be nowadays) the best course of action is to do something similar to what The Blair Witch Project did. Make it believable but also keep it under wraps enough that the story wouldn’t be plastered everywhere. Make it about a few missing people and the local media doesn’t get involved instead of what happens in the movie where it’s a BIG thing.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this maybe check out our longer posts like this where we rank our favorites of a specific franchise and other cool posts. Well, that’s all, go check out our Twitter and Instagram @slashithorror. Like always, remember, treat everyday, like it’s Halloween