It cost just $60,000 to make, but it had taken $80 million in the US by last weekend. Without gore or special effects, it has left audiences screaming - but not for more.
The screaming starts about halfway into the movie, and it starts in the audience. A few scattered screams at first, then a wave of them as the film taps deeper into the fears within our imaginations. It really is all in the mind, because the film we are watching, The Blair Witch Project, is that rare modern horror movie which wholly eschews graphic gore and flashy effects. At the end there is complete silence in the cinema, followed by audible sighs of relief and a hum of conversation building as we file towards the exit.
Two hours earlier, the air was uncomfortably humid on a blisteringly hot afternoon in New York. Inside the Angelika Film Centre in Greenwich Village the air was heavy with anticipation as the queue coiled like a snake around the cinema's spacious lobby. The last few seats had been sold for the 3.15 p.m. show of The Blair Witch Project, the hottest ticket in town, which was playing every hour at the Angelika - and every other screening for the rest of the day was completely booked out too.
The extraordinary thing about it all is that some people in the audience clearly believed that what they had been watching was for real. They got so caught up in the gritty realism of The Blair Witch Project that they did not realise it is a mock-documentary - or mockumentary as its makers call it. Not that knowing this made the experience any the more comfortable. Two weeks later, I still feel tingles recalling some of the movie's creepier moments.
The film opened on a very limited release in the US - playing on just 30 screens across the country for a fortnight and breaking box-office records at all of them. Then the release widened to 1,101 screens and the movie went through the roof. Warners brought the opening of their expensive shark movie, Deep Blue Sea, forward by two days to avoid clashing with the spread of the no-budget horror movie, and Universal Pictures pushed the release of Mystery Men back by a week to keep away from it.
When the weekend box-office figures came in, Runaway Bride, the romantic comedy re-teaming Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, topped the chart with takings of $35 million from 3,158 screens, but The Blair Witch Project earned $29 million in the same period from just 1,101 screens. Deep Blue Sea limped in third with $19 million from 2,854 screens.
The Blair Witch per-screen average of $26,528 set a new record for a film on a wide release in the US, easily breaking the previous record of $21,822 set by Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace in May. Made on video and on 16mm for a minuscule budget in the region of $60,000, The Blair Witch Project had taken more than $80 million in the US by last Sunday night, after just its second weekend on wide release, and it could well prove the most profitable movie ever made.
"It's like having an out-of-body experience just looking at the figures," comments Amir Malin, co-president of the fledgling US distribution company, Artisan, which bought the world rights to the film for $1.1 million after it screened in a midnight slot at the Sundance Film Festival last January. None of the more prominent distributors of independent productions saw any potential in it, and one of them must now be eating his words for having commented at Sundance that "the only thing scary about Blair Witch is how much they (Artisan) paid for it".
The film opens with a title card which reads: "In October of 1994 three student film-makers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary . . . A year later their footage was found." The mockumentary style of the film purports to follow their experiences, beginning on a relatively light-hearted note as the film-makers arrive in Maryland and visit a cemetery before speaking to local residents about the legendary Blair Witch, which supposedly has been responsible for a series of child murders.
SO FAR, so mundane, and these expository sequences are relatively boring, lulling the viewer into a state of complacency - which is soon to be shattered. The deeper the student film-makers venture into the woods, the edgier the movie's mood turns, and by their second night, a mutual sense of dread dawns on them as they hear eerie noises outside their tent. Then they get lost and start to blame each other for their misfortunes - and the atmosphere of unrelieved fear builds to the point where one of the filmmakers says, "I'm scared to close my eyes. I'm scared to open them."
The three student film-makers are played by unknown actors, each of whom is playing a character with the same first name - Heather Donahue as the director, who is shooting with a Hi8 video camera, Josh Leonard as the 16mm camera operator who's filming in black-and-white, and Mike Williams as the sound recordist. The story is told entirely from the subjective point of view of their two handheld cameras, and while the jerkiness of the camerawork might feel jarring initially, the decision to stick with it for the whole film - just like the casting of completely unfamiliar actors - firmly pays off in terms of authenticity and plausibility.
The Blair Witch Project is the first feature directed by Eduardo Sanchez, who is 30, was born in Cuba and raised in Maryland, and 35-yearold Daniel Mynick, from Florida. They met as students at the University of Central Florida film school in Orlando and honed their skills on other people's projects while devising a film of their own.
Both are aficionados of horror movies - really scary horror movies such as The Exorcist, The Omen and The Shining, they are quick to point out, and not the knowing likes of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer which had made it difficult for younger viewers, in particular, to take the genre seriously any more.
Without any realistic hopes of raising a budget, they opted to shoot their film in a video verite style and used credit card advances to cover the initial shooting budget of $25,000. In their impressively resourceful scheme of things, they hired their unknown actors - chosen from hundreds who were auditioned - and gave them a crash training course in using camera and sound equipment, took them off to the Seneca Creek state park in Maryland and sent them off with just an outline narrative.
The actors, who were fed with morsels of clues along the way, had no idea where the narrative was leading. Mynick and Sanchez call this approach Method film-making - as in Method acting - because the actors were living their roles 24 hours a day during the short eight-day shoot.
"We gave the characters the names of the actors who were playing them so that when they hit deep states of despair and real emotion, they could react as naturally as possible," says Mynick. Sadistically, he and Sanchez heightened the movie's naturalistic quality by paying surprise visits to their actors' campsite late at night and making disturbing sounds.
Further blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, Mynick and Sanchez followed the movie's post-production by designing an elaborate Internet site that offers supplementary backstory information such as video clips of outtakes, a history of the Blair Witch and what purports to be visual evidence of the student film-makers' fate.
The Blair Witch website was fuelling interest even before the world premiere at Sundance in January, and it now has registered in excess of 50 million hits. While film distributors have used websites over the past four years, The Blair Witch Project is by far the most sophisticated - and most successful - example to date of marketing a movie over the Internet.
In a lean, taut 87 minutes, the movie plays on our fears of the unknown and of the dark and proves - as Deliverance did, for example - that the great outdoors can prove just as threatening an environment for a horror movie as any haunted house. Crucially, Mynick and Sanchez adopted the philosophy of the great Alfred Hitchcock - that what is powerfully suggested is more likely to frighten audiences than buckets of blood and gore.
While they try to come to terms with the magnitude of their movie's success - their original ambition extended no further than securing a direct-to-video or cable station sale - Mynick and Sanchez are planning another feature film together - something completely different, a comedy, Heart of Love, which they claim will be "the most politically incorrect film ever". Then there will be the inevitable commercial imperative of revisiting the phenomenon that The Blair Witch Project has become for a sequel. Or maybe a prequel. How does The Blair Witch Project Episode 1 sound?
The Blair Witch Project opens in Ireland on October 22nd. The film's Web address is www.blairwitch.com