Poster for the film 'The Blair Witch Project'

Poster for the film 'The Blair Witch Project', 1999.

'The Blair Witch Project' is a 1999 American supernatural horror film written, directed and edited by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. It tells the fictional story of three student filmmakers—Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard—who hike in the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland in 1994 to film a documentary about a local legend known as the Blair Witch. The three disappeared, but their equipment and footage is discovered a year later. The purportedly "recovered footage" is the film the viewer sees.

'The Blair Witch Project' is thought to be the first widely released film marketed primarily by the Internet. The film's official website featured faux police reports as well as "newsreel-style" interviews. These augmented the film's found footage device to spark debates across the Internet over whether the film was a real-life documentary or a work of fiction.

During screenings, the filmmakers made advertising efforts to promulgate the events in the film as factual, including the distribution of flyers at festivals such as Sundance, asking viewers to come forward with any information about the "missing" students. The campaign tactic was that viewers were being told, through missing persons posters, that the characters were missing while researching in the woods for the mythical Blair Witch. The IMDb page also listed the actors as "missing, presumed dead" in the first year of the film's availability. The film's website contains materials of actors posing as police and investigators giving testimony about their casework, and shared childhood photos of the actors to add a sense of realism.