Friday, October 5, 2012

Blair Witch Project


In the year 1999 a movie called the Blair Witch Project came out. It was a horror movie based off a story about something called the blair witch that lived in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland and killed people who went camping. The movie is based off of 3 friends who are making a documentary about this phenomenon. The movie made millions when it came out because the people that made it were very clever. 
The whole movie is shot half on a hand held consumer based camcorder and the other on an actual film camera. In the entire film, aside from the woods, they use 2-3 actual locations one of which is a parking lot. Also, aside from the 3 main characters there are maybe 4 other people in the whole film. They shot and produced the entire thing for roughly 25,000 dollars but made millions at the box office. This is because they spent a ton of money on advertising and they started hyping the movie about 6 months to a year in advance. During the ads they played they hyped the movie as the scariest thing ever. Because of this insane advertising, hyping the movie as the scariest thing ever, everyone who went to see it was extremely scared. The funny thing is, is that the movie itself is horrible. Its not very scary and its very poorly acted. The way in which it is shot is confusing as well because they switch between the film camera and the camera the main characters are using for there documentary a lot. I really don't like this movie but i also appreciate how the producers made millions because they were very clever. It proved that advertising is extremely powerful. This was also one of the first movies to use the internet to advertise for it. The movie was touted as a true story online and thus millions were already wrapped up in seeing it.

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