![]() ![]() ![]() This gave audiences the feeling that what they were seeing was not superficially horrifying, but really and truly so. When the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1999, the cast members, who were credited under their real names, were listed as missing or deceased. Found footage was the perfect filmmaking model to make this presentation work, but it went further than that. The genius of The Blair Witch Project's marketing was they way it presented the events of the film as things that really happened. Sometimes, a movie is only as successful as its marketing campaign. Thus, where other found footage movies failed to create a guise of authenticity, The Blair Witch Project did so successfully, making found footage a staple subgenre of horror cinema. It's a convincing effect, one heightened by the low-quality camera and audio equipment used to capture it all. ![]() Because they truly are out in the woods, their terror when they realize they are lost and in danger comes across as believable. The Blair Witch Project does this especially well thanks to its cast, who do an excellent job of pretending that they're not acting. These choices serve to make the movie appear "real," in part because of how un-staged and stripped down everything is in comparison to most film productions. Of course, this is an intentional effect on the part of the director, who wanted to make it seem as though they had discovered the footage in the abandoned cameras of three missing filmmakers. ![]() Thanks to its amateur, handheld-camera-footage style, it appears that the events of the film really happened to the people involved. Although The Blair Witch Project didn't invent the found footage genre, it certainly popularized it. Oftentimes, found footage movies make use of first-person perspective and may be presented as pseudo-documentaries in an effort to trick audiences into accepting their authenticity. The meaning of the "found footage" style of filmmaking lies in the name: footage is presented as though it was discovered (i.e., found) rather than scripted, directed, and recorded by professionals. ![]()
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