Random Wild Details Cast And Crew Has Revealed About Making 'Blair Witch Project' (14 items)

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  (#7) The Crew Spent Nights Finding Low-Fi Ways To Scare The Actors

  Free of the big budget of Hollywood blockbusters, the crew had to think outside the box to create scares for the actors to encounter. Not only did filmmakers control how much information about the Blair Witch each cast member possessed, they also allowed them to believe the legend was real and not created for the film. Actual townspeople included plants meant to lead the cast to different conclusions or provide further detail about the mythology to create a sense of reality about it.

  As Donahue, Leonard, and Williams filmed, the crew stayed out of sight. During the night, the crew dressed in dark colors or camouflage clothing in order to snap branches in the woods, slam their hands on tent walls, or make creepy noises to antagonize the cast. Not every scare worked as it was supposed to, according to Myrick:

  We had this whole plan of having this guy - this creepy moment where there might have been an analysis where if someone looks closely there'd be a little glow-y, white humanoid figure in the woods somewhere. We had a friend of ours dress up in white long johns and be parked off in the woods just between the trees, and our hope was that as the camera was running, it would catch a little glimpse of this guy. That was what Heather was reacting to [when running through the woods], saying "What the f*ck is that?" but we never got it to read on camera. I felt bad for the guy, because it was pretty cold that night and he fell into the water. We had to take our clothes off to get to him. A lot of work for no end result, except for, "What the f*ck is that?"
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  (#9) Donahue's Audition Was So Good That Filmmakers Changed The Role For Her

  Auditions for the movie's lead roles involved improvisation from the moment each actor entered the room with Myrick and Sánchez. Originally the filmmakers wanted to have three men as the college students lost in the Maryland woods while looking for the Blair Witch. However, once Donahue entered the picture, the role changed to that of a woman. 

  In 2015, Donahue told The Week how she landed the part:

  When we went into audition, he asked us to improvise, and my improv was: "You have been in prison. You've served nine years of a 25-year sentence, but you're up for parole. Why should we let you out?" And I guess I was the only person that said, "I don't think you should."
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  (#15) The Actors Received A Crash Course In Recording Sound And Video

  Only Leonard had previous experience with filming, but none with the specific CP-16 camera his character uses in the film. Each actor received a quick rundown of how to operate the CP-16 and Hi8 cameras used to make the movie. Williams served as the sound guy for the movie both as a character and in reality, learning to plug in the right cords and use DAT on the fly. This led to mistakes, some of which remain in the movies, as Leonard recalled:

  I’d never shot with the CP-16 before. It was a beast of a camera - mostly used for news broadcasts before video was invented. When I arrived in Maryland, I was introduced to the late and great Neal Fredericks, who was in charge of the film’s "look." He and I went out shooting for a day so I could learn the ins and outs of the CP. But even that didn’t save me from screwing up a bunch of the footage - that whole conversation in the movie about feet versus meters after we left Mary Brown’s house - that was real. That was me realizing that I’d screwed up the calculations for my measurements and the footage was probably going to be out of focus.
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  (#2) The Actors Families Received Sympathy Cards From People That Thought They Were No Longer Alive

  Prior to Artisan Entertainment purchasing the distribution rights to The Blair Witch Project, Myrick and Sánchez created a website featuring a missing poster with the names and pictures of the cast members. Set up as a real event in a time where this type of marketing was unheard of, people believed the movie to be a real documentary. After Artisan came aboard, they updated and improved the site for continued use as a marketing tool, causing many people to think Donahue, Leonard, and Williams actually went missing and possibly perished in 1994.

  Leonard recalled his parents receiving sympathies and reactions from fans:

  Our parents were getting condolence calls. Then, when the cat was finally out of the bag and we started press, some people still didn’t believe us. They thought we were actors, hired to play Josh, Mike and Heather in order to keep the whole thing from seeming like a snuff film. To this day, there are still conspirac[y] theories about this stuff.
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  (#5) The Nights Weren't As Intense As They Seemed

  On film, the nighttime sequences come across as nightmare fuel perpetrated by unseen forces tromping through the forest to wreck havoc on the cast. In reality, the fear portrayed by the actors masked their frustration and impatience with being woken up. According to Leonard:

  People always ask if we were actually scared when the filmmakers messed with us in the middle of the night. The answer is not really... because what was usually happening behind the scenes was we were exhausted and hungry and often wet. We’d set up camp and crash, and just about the time we got warm enough in our damp sleeping bags to fall asleep, the guys would start playing a boom box with creepy children sounds outside the tent. So a lot of what you’re seeing on film, is directly following a collective groan, when we realized we had to pull our shoes back on and start acting again.
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  (#4) The Actors Invented A Safe Word For When They Got Too Deep In Character

  Since the film included near-constant filming and staying in the roles of characters increasingly losing their collective sanity, the three actors decided to create a safe word. Leonard recalled:

  Tensions got high, we got hungry, we got uncomfortable, and we hurt each other’s feelings. So we came up with a safe word for whenever we had to break character and remind ourselves this was just a job: taco. We regretted that by about day three. It just kept reminding us how hungry we were.

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