After “The Blair Witch Project” was picked up for distribution, the final budget grew considerably prior to the film’s premiere at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. Reportedly, a sound remix and 35mm transfer saw the final budget grow to around $600,000. But with a global box office take of $248 million, that increase from $60,000 to $600,000 turned out to be negligible. What’s important here, though, is not what distributors Artisan Entertainment made from “The Blair Witch” or that the movie became one of the most successful independent films of all time, but that Bruce Willis apparently possesses supernatural abilities of his own.
Willis’ comments are especially impressive considering his claim that the first low-budget camcorder film would spawn “hundreds” like it, which is exactly what has happened in the wake of “Blair Witch.” Found footage is now, itself, a well-established genre, with numerous films taking their cues from Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s modest production. It’s a lineage that includes such celebrated efforts as Oren Peli’s 2007 horror flick “Paranormal Activity” and Matt Reeves’ 2008 monster horror feature “Cloverfield” — two of the scariest found footage horror movies ever made. Of course, you could make the point that this genre dates all the way back to films like 1980’s “Cannibal Holocaust” or even earlier than that, but “Blair Witch” was the first time such a low-budget film that embraced the lo-fi nature of its filmmaking equipment received such widespread acclaim and attention.
Even today, you can see the influence of “Blair Witch.” Take something like “Skinamarink,” one of the scariest horror films of 2023. Kyle Edward Ball’s film was made on a budget of just $15,000 and shot in the director’s childhood home. With its embrace of lo-fi aesthetics and its modest production, it feels very much part of the legacy of “Blair Witch” and shows that Willis’ prediction rings true all the way to our present day.
Not that Quentin Tarantino has struggled in any sense since he made “Pulp Fiction,” then, but when Willis tells the director at the beginning of the clip in question, “You should be the first guy to do this,” Tarantino might have done well to have listened.
