Credit: Haxan Films / Artisan EntertainmentAt a time when the Internet was relatively new, the found-footage horror film, The Blair Witch Project (1999), which focuses on three film students who go missing in the woods, convinced an entire generation of cinemagoers that what they’d just watched was real.
But despite being incredibly convincing, thankfully, it turned out to be nothing more than the ingenious work of co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, who had sent three young actors posing as student filmmakers into a forest near Burkittsville, Maryland.
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Before disappearing into the woods, Heather Donahue, Michael C Williams, and Joshua Leonard would interview locals about the legend of the Blair Witch. But once they entered the Black Hills forest, the three would be tormented and hunted by an unseen entity.
With a modest budget of $200,000 — 750,000, The Blair Witch Project grossed nearly $250 million worldwide, becoming a global phenomenon and the most successful independent film of all time, dethroning Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990).
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But while the film would pave the way for the found-footage genre, it didn’t become the multi-movie franchise we expected. Its sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000), failed on almost every level, and it would be another 16 years before Blair Witch returned.
Like its two predecessors, Blair Witch (2016) was another box office success, but despite being a vast improvement over the 2000 sequel and even genuinely unnerving for the most part, fans and critics weren’t overly impressed, and the film received mixed reviews.
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But there’s more Blair Witch to come, as it was reported earlier this year that a new film is in development at Lionsgate, while The Blair Witch Project co-director Eduardo Sánchez is reportedly attached to a television series based on the film franchise.
The premise for either project is unknown, and we also don’t know if they’ll follow the found-footage format. However, it’s possible they’ll draw inspiration from a “lost” Blair Witch prequel, which Sánchez recently revealed on a recent episode of the Cult FM podcast.
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The director went into detail about an unmade prequel script he and Myrick developed over a decade years ago, which would have involved a series of period pieces featuring characters mentioned in the Blair Witch films and other media, such as Rustin Parr and Elly Kedward.
“In our mythology, as far as the Blair Witch is concerned, this thing existed long before it was called the Blair Witch,” Sánchez explained. “The Native Americans have been living with this thing for way before Europeans got here. [Myrick and I] wrote a [prequel] to our movie probably more than ten years ago now.”
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Sánchez said that Lionsgate had already started to fund the project, but ultimately, the budget was too high for the studio to continue, which is why it never saw the light of day.
“Lionsgate paid us and it was a legit, ‘We’re gonna let you guys write a script.’ We were really proud of the script and Lionsgate really did love the script, they just didn’t want to spend — it was a little bit too expensive for them to pull the trigger on it. I understand why they hesitated.”
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The prequel would have delved into the origins of the Blair Witch, and Sánchez explained how they wanted to “bounce around in time” seemingly across three films, or a “prequel trilogy”, if you will.
“If we had been able to do it, we would have gone back and done the Elly Kedward story, which was the original Blair Witch, which would have had a lot of Native influence, at least a few Native American characters. Then we wanted to go and do a Rustin Parr story. We wanted to do these period-piece horror movies, then eventually go into a sequel, six years down the road or ten years down the road. But unfortunately, it just didn’t work out for us to do it.”
There’s no release date for the new Blair Witch film or the television series.
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