Random Wild Details Cast And Crew Has Revealed About Making 'Blair Witch Project' (14 items)

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  (#11) The Ending Was One Of The 'Most Traditional' Parts Of The Production

  Perhaps surprisingly, filmmakers allotted two days to film the final scene and used several takes to get it right. Prior to filming, Sánchez recorded Leonard yelling for help and then used a boombox to prompt Williams to run into the woods looking for his lost friend. The moment where Donahue and Williams emerge from the woods to see a dilapidated house was real, as they had no idea where the movie's denouement took place.

  Myrick recalled:

  For example, the final scene with the house, it looks like it's all one take. Heather's shrieking in the house, and it looks like she's losing her mind, but we shot that over multiple takes and over two days—that was one of the most traditional segments of the movie. We had to really set and reset and be careful walking through that house so that nobody got hurt. It was much more orchestrated.
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  (#2) The Actors Families Received Sympathy Cards From People That Thought They Were No Longer Alive

  Prior to Artisan Entertainment purchasing the distribution rights to The Blair Witch Project, Myrick and Sánchez created a website featuring a missing poster with the names and pictures of the cast members. Set up as a real event in a time where this type of marketing was unheard of, people believed the movie to be a real documentary. After Artisan came aboard, they updated and improved the site for continued use as a marketing tool, causing many people to think Donahue, Leonard, and Williams actually went missing and possibly perished in 1994.

  Leonard recalled his parents receiving sympathies and reactions from fans:

  Our parents were getting condolence calls. Then, when the cat was finally out of the bag and we started press, some people still didn’t believe us. They thought we were actors, hired to play Josh, Mike and Heather in order to keep the whole thing from seeming like a snuff film. To this day, there are still conspirac[y] theories about this stuff.
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  (#14) The Premise Of The Movie Came From Myrick And Sánchez Wanting To Be Scared

  College friends Myrick and Sánchez came up with the premise of the movie in 1991 while lamenting the lack of really frightening movies available to them. After watching their favorite faux-documentary horror movies like Legend of Boggy Creek, the pair thought up placing filmmakers into a forest where they come upon a house filled with Satanic symbolism and compulsion to enter it. Sánchez explained their choice of antagonist:

  That was a big discussion. What is it [that they're looking for]? Is it a witch? Some kind of warlock? What the hell is it? And a witch, for us, was just kind of the only thing you could do. We liked the idea of it being centered in Maryland. […] And Maryland is close enough to the Salem witch trials - a really dark period of our history that a lot of people know about.
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  (#13) Filming Lasted 24 Hours A Day For Eight Days Straight

  Donahue, Leonard, and Williams really filmed and recorded audio for the entire film, explaining the shaky movements and sometimes poor sound quality of the finished product. This created an atmosphere where the cameras and the actors had to be on 24 hours a day throughout the eight-day shoot. 

  Myrick explained:

  We just led them around on a 24-hour-a-day stage play, really. We set up all the set pieces before hand, and they would just follow our directions...We shook their tent, we played sounds of little kids playing outside their tent, we made noises in the middle of the night, we led them to this crazy house at the end—we basically just played the Blair Witch.
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  (#5) The Nights Weren't As Intense As They Seemed

  On film, the nighttime sequences come across as nightmare fuel perpetrated by unseen forces tromping through the forest to wreck havoc on the cast. In reality, the fear portrayed by the actors masked their frustration and impatience with being woken up. According to Leonard:

  People always ask if we were actually scared when the filmmakers messed with us in the middle of the night. The answer is not really... because what was usually happening behind the scenes was we were exhausted and hungry and often wet. We’d set up camp and crash, and just about the time we got warm enough in our damp sleeping bags to fall asleep, the guys would start playing a boom box with creepy children sounds outside the tent. So a lot of what you’re seeing on film, is directly following a collective groan, when we realized we had to pull our shoes back on and start acting again.
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  (#8) The Crew Left Less Food For The Actors Over The Course Of The Shoot

  The filmmakers promised the cast their safety, but not their comfort through the shoot. A part of that included a lack of food commensurate to that of the fictional college students they portrayed. Making sure never to starve the cast, Williams remembered the rations:

  Let's say the first day was a sandwich and a bag of chips for lunch, and the second day was maybe just the sandwich, the third day was maybe just the bag of chips, the fourth day maybe we didn't have a lunch. By the last couple of days, there was enough to sustain, but not a lot of food. So they decreased the amount of food we were eating, which we knew was going to happen, but it wasn't like... It wasn't like we didn't eat for days. Our safety was never at risk. The whole idea was to have us as uncomfortable as possible without putting us in danger.

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