The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 American supernatural horror film written, directed, and edited by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. It is a fictional story of three student filmmakers—Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard—who hike into the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland, in 1994 to film a documentary about a local myth known as the Blair Witch. The three disappear, but their equipment and footage are discovered a year later. The purportedly "found footage" is the movie the viewer sees.
Myrick and Sánchez conceived of a fictional legend of the Blair Witch in 1993. They developed a 35-page screenplay with the dialogue to be improvised.
About 20 hours of footage was shot, which was edited down to 82 minutes. Shot on an original budget of $35,000–60,000, the film had a final cost of $200,000–750,000 after post-production edits.
The Blair Witch Project grossed nearly $250 million worldwide, making it one of the most successful independent films of all time, as well as the 29th most profitable horror film, while also being a sleeper hit. The film launched a media franchise, which includes two sequels (Book of Shadows and Blair Witch), novels, comic books, and video games. The film is credited with reviving the found-footage technique that was later used by similarly successful horror films such as Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield.
