In the history of cinema, there's never been an event quite like The Blair Witch Project. It achieved the status of blockbuster on an estimated budget of just $60,000, and, along the way, managed to convince us all that it could, in fact, all be real. Following the fate of three college students lost in the Marylands backwoods, The Blair Witch Project represents a moment in time when our collective naivety with new technology allowed us to believe in the unknown.

Starting life as a simple idea about a pseudo-documentary, it went on to kickstart the found-footage subgenre of horror. For its 25th anniversary, FILMHOUNDS spoke with directors Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick.

In the 25 years since you released The Blair Witch Project the world has changed in so many ways. Can you recall where you were in your lives when you started working on it, and whether there were any signs at the time that it might blow up as much as it did?

Eduardo Sánchez: Dan and I went to film school together. We were broke film students and we had just seen the Nightmare on Elm Street movie Freddy's Dead. That got us talking after about how scary movies, like movies that are genuinely scary, were just so hard to find, and at the time this was the early ‘90s.

So we just started talking about the movies that we really loved and we crossed paths with these pseudo-documentaries from the ‘70s like The Legend of Boggy Creek and this TV show called In Search Of. We went out and rented some on VHS and found they were still really effective, still really creepy in the way that they were when we were kids. So we started talking about whether we could do that to a modern audience.

We put it aside for a few years because there were other films we were working on and luckily we gained allies along the way and we got together just enough money to make it, and we found a good location, great actors, great collaborators. The planets aligned for us and here we are 25 years later still talking about it to people like you. It's been a crazy ride, and it's crazy how little it started and how way beyond our expectations it grew.

Daniel Myrick: Yeah I think it's a perfect example of how something very small can just catch on. The conceit of the concept, about how our little company found this footage that we're going to reveal to the world, it just had a really good hook to it. Whenever Ed and I would pitch the concept to anybody they'd always be like “Oh, really!? When are you gonna show us!?” And we'd always have to confess that it was all fake and we were just making it all up.

So it just goes to show you what an idea can do — it can take on a life of its own, and really, the sky's the limit. Budget isn't really an issue if you've got a good concept and you treat it well, we've seen on YouTube a million times now that people can just go and do something silly and sometimes it just explodes. So it's really just an example of that viral phenomenon that people just latch onto if it works.

I was only nine years old when it came out but I have a really vivid memory of the conversation around it being whether it was real or not, and whether these people had really gone missing and died or whatever. Even now, it seems to be spoken about in terms of how amazing it was that you pulled off this feeling that it could all be real, and how audiences responded to that. Is that something you're proud of, or do you ever wish you could talk more about the film itself?

DM: I think for me, I love it all. One of the coolest things about The Exorcist, for example, was all the behind-the-scenes conspiracies, you know? People dying, crew members dropping off, that was like “What!?” So there's a certain phenomenon that surrounds these kinds of movies that's bigger than the movies themselves. That helps with the marketing, obviously, but it tells you as a filmmaker that people are really responding to the film and to the concept, and to the experience. That's really satisfying.

I don't know how many times we got news reports sent to us about people being sick in the cinema during our movie, and you know that was probably because the camera was shaky on a big screen, so people were getting vertigo — I felt sorry for anyone watching it in the first five rows ‘cause those guys were really in for it, but that kind of stuff makes for a cool story around the movie. Whether the stories are completely true or not, I don't think it matters, but it just means people are embracing your movie and getting more of an experience out of it than you may have even planned for, and I think that's pretty cool.

ES: When people meet me they're always hesitant to ask about this stuff. I think they assume I'm sick of talking about it, but I'm like if you want to talk to me about something I did 25 years ago then why wouldn't I want to talk to you about it. And the movie just has a lot of interesting things about it — the timing, the marketing, you can talk about the website that we set up as if it was a campaign to find these missing people, that's a whole story of its own. Even the unique way that we made it, we shot it on Hi8 and it became this worldwide theatrical film.

DM: I think it was digital Hi8, right?

ES: Yeah exactly. It's just silly. A whole film on this silly little format we used. And we were able to step back a little bit during filming to geek out over our own film, but I think now we have enough distance from it where we can appreciate the good things that it brought us. I've started to put any negative stuff to one side and just be grateful for this gift of a movie that was given to us. It changed all of our lives, and I just feel very fortunate to be a part of it and that I'm still a part of it.

Just picking up on what you mentioned there about shooting the film — that's another element of it that seems to have become almost mythical over time. There are stories about GPS trackers and milk crates with directorial notes being hidden in the woods, but how much of that is true?

DM: Yeah that's pretty much the way we shot it. Our intention early on was to just lay out a plan that would allow the actors as much freedom as we could muster while still being able to control the process. We had a shooting outline that we went with, and Ed and I mapped out where all the gags would be in this campsite that had been in the woods beforehand. Our producer, Gregg Hale, had military experience and he suggested using these GPS trackers that hunters use for hunting and whatnot.

So we used those to give them way points that allowed the actors to go unaided through the woods without us, which I think allowed them to remain as much in character as possible without the traditional action, cut, scene, take two, take three — that kind of thing which I think takes you out of the moment. We just wanted to give them that freedom and spontaneity that you want from a documentary.

So, once they got to a waypoint, there was a milk crate box there with a bicycle flag in it, and they were instructed to put the tapes they had shot that day in there so we could come and get them later on, and we'd refresh the batteries, leave them food and stuff like that. It was a process that we weren't sure was going to work at the time, but the intention was to give that freedom of movement, and freedom to perform whenever they wanted, all instructed by our directing notes that were left at each one of these checkpoints.

We'd use those to adjust their performances based on what we were reviewing on these tapes, I would also shadow the actors and we'd camp nearby to try and gauge their performances. It was a sort of method approach to the whole shoot. We thought of it like, we might shoot eight days worth of footage but as long we get a handful of really good moments we're good, and it just worked out. We got a hell of a lot more than we'd anticipated. That's why we made a whole movie out of it rather than the pseudo-documentary that we wanted to make.

ES: We were kind of making it up as we went, man. Dan and I, early on, we were like, huge fans of War of the Worlds but we never wanted to do a big hoax or anything like that. In fact, we thought that if we did that and people then found out that's what we did it'd end up being detrimental to the movie. But we decided we had to have this thing where everything we see in the movie, there can be no clues that it's not real. No soundtrack, no lighting at night, everything had to be shot by the characters, we had these rules and we stuck to them.