“I was pleasantly surprised by the inside scoop we learned on the hike,” Debbie Kaplan, 54, of Germantown, Maryland, wrote in an email.“The hike was well-led, well-attended, and a great way to spend a dreary Sunday afternoon.”Īctor Michael C. “When I first saw the movie (10 years ago) it was pretty scary,” he said. One of the hikers, Kelsey Stanford, 27, from Upper Marlboro, Maryland, said that after seeing the filming locations, he wanted to watch the movie again. The hike included a visit to the famous “Coffin Rock.” In the film, the filmmakers travel to the massive rock formation after hearing stories of fur trappers who were supposedly mutilated there. 8 at Seneca Creek, leading fans to some of the film’s iconic locations and explaining their significance. Park Ranger Erik Ledbetter led a Blair Witch Heritage Hike Oct. Seneca Creek has grown to embrace the film’s popularity. It had everything we were looking for,” said Sanchez. Sanchez and De Cassan also used to hike and picnic in the park. Sanchez’s girlfriend at the time (now his wife), Stefanie De Cassan, lived a few miles from Seneca Creek State Park, so it was a “totally pragmatic decision” to shoot the majority of the film there, he said. “There’s this dark, natural world that’s out there,” Sanchez said. His family also went camping in the Shenandoah National Park, and he said that helped inspire the decision to have the student filmmakers camp in the woods.Ī lot of the scary moments the students in the film experience in the woods - like noises outsides of tents and the idea that “something is hanging around” - came from Sanchez being scared as a kid, he said. ![]() He said the creek was “this forbidden thing” because his mother didn’t want him to get wet or dirty playing in it. “A lot of my early memories of adventure and fear and horror were all in that creek.” He was especially inspired by Long Branch Creek behind his apartment, in Silver Spring, Maryland. They also created their own film company, Haxan Films, which later produced “The Blair Witch Project.” The television series helped inspire Sanchez and Myrick to create this “documentary” of their own about students getting lost in the woods. They bonded over mysterious and creepy documentaries like the “In Search of…” TV series hosted by Leonard Nimoy, which “used to scare the crap out of us on a regular basis,” Sanchez said. Sanchez attended film school at the University of Central Florida, where he met “Blair Witch” co-director Daniel Myrick. Growing up in Maryland inspired Sanchez, who now lives in Frederick, to film the movie in the state. They also had the actors do their own filming, and the resulting grainy, black-and-white footage became a Blair Witch trademark.The movie was filmed in 1997 primarily in two locations: the small town of Burkittsville, and Seneca Creek State Park in Gaithersburg. To make The Blair Witch Project seem more realistic and heighten the psychological tension, Sanchez and Myrick reportedly did things to agitate the actors during production, such as shaking their tent and cutting back on their food supply. The two filmmakers had their lead actors-Heather Donahue, Michael Williams and Joshua Leonard-improvise their lines based on private messages each actor received during filming. Unlike other horror films that featured bloody scenes and special effects, The Blair Witch Project scared moviegoers through implied terror and violence.Įduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, who met as film students at the University of Central Florida, wrote and directed The Blair Witch Project. The trio never returned to civilization, but their film equipment was supposedly found and the footage they shot became The Blair Witch Project. The filmmakers got lost and experienced a series of scary events and unexplained phenomena, such as strange noises and piles of stones being inexplicably re-arranged. The Blair Witch Project followed the young filmmakers as they went into the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, to make a documentary about a local legend known as the Blair Witch. Fake or not, it didn’t matter at the box office: The Blair Witch Project grossed some $250 million worldwide and was featured on the covers of Newsweek and Time magazines. With the help of a Web-based viral marketing strategy-a relatively new concept at the time- The Blair Witch Project generated huge buzz over the question of whether or not it was based on a true story. ![]() Shot with shaky, handheld cameras, the documentary-style movie told the story of three student filmmakers who disappeared into the woods and were never heard from again, although their footage was later discovered. On July 30, 1999, The Blair Witch Project, a low-budget, independent horror film that will become a massive cult hit, is released in U.S.
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