‘The Blair Witch Project’ at 20: Why It Can’t Be Replicated

"In some ways, “The Blair Witch Project,” with its blurring of fact and fiction, helped create that very media landscape that would preclude its viral success today.

In the 20 years since the film’s debut, that landscape has shifted profoundly. The arrival of YouTube in 2005, which made video-sharing a global, social and economic enterprise, has deepened that blur. Add to that the rise in reality TV, fake news and phenomena like “deepfakes,” which use real images and voices to completely fabricate videos, and it becomes hard to imagine a hoax-based movie campaign ever again gaining that kind of currency.

Even the team that devised the original online strategy for “Blair Witch” recognizes today that they passed through a narrow window.

“Now it wouldn’t work,” Sánchez said. One could easily look find out on the internet that Heather from “Blair Witch” was an actress named Heather Donahue — who hadn’t disappeared at all. 


Still, few have matched that team’s care and inventiveness since."

read the article By JAKE KRING-SCHREIFELS