Online discussions were conducted via bulletin boards, meaning a slower, more controlled spread of information as opposed to the constant, relentless, and instant information (and misinformation) dump we all experience today.Īll of this played to Blair Witch's advantage in terms of building buzz. And even more importantly, there was no social media. The internet as a domestic service was in its infancy-while plenty of homes were online by this point, the possibilities of the internet as a commercial tool were still being explored by individuals and organisations. It's crucial to remember that this was the late-1990s. And while no subsequent filmmakers expected to recoup 4,000 times their production budget like Blair Witch did, the success showed that a few friends and a domestic grade camcorder was all you needed to be in with a shot at making a small profit.īut while this might be the reason why horror in the 2000s was defined by the sheer number of found footage movies, it doesn't explain why The Blair Witch Project was such a phenomenon to start with. This was a film that cost a measly $60,000 to make and yet earned nearly $250 million worldwide. But it was the one that ushered the concept into the 21st Century and provided a filmmaking template for dozens of cash-strapped filmmakers. The Blair Witch Project wasn't the first found footage horror movie, just as Halloween wasn't the first slasher movie. Found footage means nothing more than a movie comprised of footage "filmed" by its protagonists, and was used throughout the decade in everything from the cheapest films imaginable to mainstream blockbusters such as Matt Reeves and JJ Abrams' Cloverfield. The same was true of found footage in the 2000s. Sometimes a horror wave isn't a specific genre-the current popularity of Stephen King adaptations cover many different types of movies, but are all unified by the appeal of the iconic writer. From Night of the Living Dead and Halloween to The Exorcist and Scream, these scary classics inspired dozens and dozens of imitators over the following years, before their popularity waned and something else took their place. The popularity of the different horror subgenres-whether zombies, slashers, possession films, killer dolls, or haunted houses-are almost always created by the huge success of a single film. There are few genres so centered around individual movie releases as horror.
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