In October 1994, three film students stepped into the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland to make a documentary on the legend of the Blair Witch and never returned. Found a year after their disappearance, the recovered footage from their cameras reveals that the force behind their demise was not only far from natural but also staggeringly evil.

Behold the blueprint of found footage horror that took moviegoers by storm upon its initial release in 1999, a testament to how authenticity and ingenuity prevail over material constraints. Made on a shoestring budget, The Blair Witch Project is one of the most successful independent films of all time; the film’s cutting-edge marketing campaign framed the missing of the students as real and drew in curious masses, making it the first ‘viral’ film at the dawn of the Internet age. More than twenty years later, the film is still nightmare fuel, with a sinister inscrutability resonating with J-horror and spine-chilling performances from actors distressed by questionable ‘method filmmaking’.

Daniel Myrick (b. 1963, United States) and Eduardo Sánchez (b. 1968, Cuba) are American filmmakers who are most noted for co-directing The Blair Witch Project (1999), a seminal work in the horror genre, for which they jointly received the inaugural Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award. The duo graduated from the film department of University of Central Florida and co-founded the production company Haxan Films with three other graduates.