The Blair Witch Project Box Office: How The Horror Movie Was Shot For Under $100,000 & Made $248 Million

Before the movie became a phenomenon, it was two friends with nowhere to go. Eduardo Sanchez was working as a bartender, and Daniel Myrick was driving a blueprint truck when they dusted off their old idea for a woods movie.

The result, The Blair Witch Project, made $248.6 million worldwide. What it cost is still a bit of a legend. Sanchez has said the original budget to get the film shot was probably between $20,000 and $25,000. Other accounts say $35,000 or $60,000. The post-production pushed the total before Sundance to somewhere between $200,000 and $750,000. Then marketing blew the budget up to nearly $8 million. Even the high estimates keep the actual shoot well under $100,000.

How The Blair Witch Project Was Made on a Tiny Budget

The savings came from a very unusual method. A cast of unknowns shot the film themselves. “The actors were actually the camera operators,” Myrick told Roger Ebert’s site. Using GPS, the directors sent them to spots marked with flags or milk crates, where they left their footage and picked up food and notes from the directors.

There was barely a script. The two wrote a roughly 35-page outline with no dialogue. “We had always wanted the dialogue to be improvised,” Sanchez said. The filmmakers also gave the actors less and less food as the shoot went on. “Over time, we sort of rationed back their food so they were hungry,” Sanchez recalled. When tempers flared, the crew had a safe word to break character, and it was “taco.”

The Viral Marketing Campaign That Made Audiences Believe It Was Real

The shoot was only half the trick. The filmmakers built a real-looking website and message board to make people believe they were watching a documentary about real people. At the Sundance premiere, fliers were handed out saying Heather, Michael, and Joshua were missing. The directors even put up missing-person flyers in person, telling anyone who spotted the actors to call the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office. The Daily Collegian later called it perhaps the first viral marketing campaign.

The gamble paid off. The film premiered at midnight on January 23, 1999, and Artisan Entertainment bought the distribution rights for $1.1 million. “That whole period was just such a crazy time,” Myrick told SciFiNow. The film opened in theaters on July 14, 1999. The buzz from Sundance and word of mouth made it one of the biggest hits of the year.

The Blair Witch Backlash, Sequels, & Its Lasting Legacy

The movie’s unprecedented success also brought backlash. Some horror fans accused the pair of borrowing from “Cannibal Holocaust,” and the makers of “The Last Broadcast” said their 1998 film was strikingly similar. A rushed sequel, “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2” (2000), was disliked by critics and audiences alike. A 2016 follow-up did only slightly better.

The film’s legacy is bigger than its sequels. It inspired a whole new type of horror movie, and nothing has matched the frenzy of 1999. Looking back, Sanchez has pointed out how little the two knew. They were “just going on instinct,” he said, “limited by our budget, our resources, and our lack of knowledge.” Maybe that limit was the secret. With so little money, the directors made the movie feel real.

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