The Blair Witch Project was a viral online marketing masterstroke before that was a thing

There’s a new version of The Blair Witch Project coming and now it has a release date: September 2027.

And what do you know, it’s been made a filmmaker, Dylan Clark, who got his start on YouTube. Marrying a horror film with a YouTuber is just the thing now.

Any remake prompts questions of “why”, and while it’s never a good idea to write off anything before it actually arrives – you never know, sometimes an updated iteration can be good – there’s an extra layer of questions around another attempt at The Blair Witch Project.

Not just because it has already been kind of remade in 2016 by Adam Wingard in a “requel” format in that it was new characters but in the same narrative canon. It was profitable but critically maligned and largely ignored, and you could say the same about Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, the 2000 sequel.

Blair Witch wasn’t just any movie. Even before it was released in 1999, it was already a cultural phenomenon.

The film was written, directed and edited by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez from a concept they had been developing since 1993.

The movie was presented as “found footage” shot by three film students – Heather, Mike and Josh – who went into the woods in Maryland to make a documentary about the mythical Blair Witch, and then disappeared.

The grainy (and motion sickness-inducing) video then reveals some of the horrors they encountered in the woods (it’s always the woods, never go into the woods, honestly), and suggests they met a grisly fate at the hands of an evil force.

It was all fictional, of course, and Heather, Mike and Josh were Heather Donohue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard, all actors. The Blair Witch Project was shot over a week, mostly in Seneca Creek State Park in Maryland.

There was about 20 hours of raw footage, which was then edited down to 80 genuinely creepy as hell minutes, which was submitted to the Sundance Film Festival. The production cost about $US60,000 ($87,000).

The Blair Witch Project went on to gross almost $US250 million worldwide, revived the “found footage” sub-genre with the likes of Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity, and spawned spoofs and meta-cultural references from the likes of Dawson’s Creek, Charmed, Psych, Robot Chicken, Family Guy, Scary Movie and even the Dick Van Dyke crime procedural Diagnosis Murder.

It was a genuine cultural moment – and it wouldn’t have happened without some very, very smart marketing.

The Blair Witch Project is widely accepted as the first movie that was predominantly marketed online, and in 1999, when internet access was expanding but not yet reached saturation point, it was still something of the wild west.

That was something The Blair Witch Project took advantage of to really sell the illusion that this fictional film was real-life found footage, which then created enormous word-of-mouth and curiosity.

At Sundance, the marketing team distributed “missing persons” flyers with photos of Donohue, Williams and Leonard, with the call-to-action to contact the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office with any information. The unknown actors’ IMDb pages had them listed as missing or dead.

The movie’s website kept up the charade and was filled with content about the investigation and the “missing” trio including made-up police reports, newspaper articles and interviews. By August 1999, the month after the film was released, the site had clocked 160 million hits.

According to The Los Angeles Times, the distribution company, Artisan, which bought The Blair Witch Project after Sundance for $US1.1 million, sent interns out into the field into clubs, cafes and venues to seed the legend, plastering missing posters and spreading the word.

The directors, Myrick and Sanchez, even made a mockumentary called Curse of the Blair Witch examining the legend in the film, featuring stories of disappearances, deaths and hauntings around the Blair, Maryland. It was broadcast on the American cable network the Sci-Fi Channel two days before the film’s release.

All up, the pre-release marketing cost Artisan about $US1.5 million, which is peanuts compared to the tens of millions a studio would normally spend print, TV and outdoor advertising on a major release.

It was a masterstroke in viral online marketing before such a thing even existed, conceived and executed to suit not only the movie itself with its “true story” mask, but also that particular moment of the internet.

It’s not something that has ever been repeated with the same effect – fool me once, shame on you – and it’s certainly not something the Blair Witch remake/sequel/requel could do.

In the nearly three decades since the release of the original, online marketing of movies has changed significantly.

Now, it’s about clipping (a different kind of fake virality) and talent stunts involving hot sauced-chicken wings and puppies.

But imagine if a 2027 Blair Witch could rewrite the rule book again – now that would be unbelievable.