The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 American psychological horror film written, directed, and edited by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. One of the most successful independent films of all time, it is a "found footage" pseudo-documentary in which three students (Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard) hike into the Appalachian Mountains near Burkittsville, Maryland, to shoot a documentary about a local myth known as the Blair Witch.
Myrick and Sánchez conceived of a fictional legend of the Blair Witch in 1993. They developed a 35-page screenplay with the dialogue to be improvised. About 20 hours of footage was shot, which was edited down to 82 minutes. Shot on an original budget of $35,000–$60,000, the film had a final cost of $200,000–$750,000 after post-production and marketing.
When The Blair Witch Project premiered at the Sundance Film Festival at midnight on January 23, 1999, its promotional marketing campaign listed the actors as either "missing" or "deceased".
The Blair Witch Project was a sleeper hit that grossed nearly $250 million worldwide. It is consistently listed as one of the scariest movies of all time. The Blair Witch Project launched a media franchise, which includes two sequels (Book of Shadows and Blair Witch), novels, comic books, and video games. It revived the found-footage technique and influenced similarly successful horror films such as Paranormal Activity (2007), REC (2007) and Cloverfield (2008).