The original Blair Witch Project’s marketing campaign was the first of its kind in 1999. It began with a $60,000 budget and grew to gross $248.6M worldwide, with the help of a “new era of viral marketing.” (STEWART, 2016)
The movie used the 5 key principles for successful Transmedia strategies as described by Lara Hoefs (2018).
Beginning with the “Compelling Story” where we are told an urban legend of an evil witch camping out in the woods in rural Maryland, followed by the ‘missing’ student filmmakers who had set out to document this urban legend. From the intense marketing strategies, people found themselves questioning if this was fact or fiction, creating conversation and interest into following the film as if it was a real crime case, right up to the films release where they could finally find out what really happened and why, toying with basic human curiosity and the adrenaline of being scared by the unknown (in this case mythology and witches).
“Cross-platform Storytelling” began in the original marketing campaign with the creation of https://www.blairwitch.com, which had more than 20 million page views before the film was even available in the cinema. The website honed into the background into the ‘missing students’ with interviews of their ‘family’ about the disappearance along with ‘evidence’ of the events leading to their fate, such as police crime scene photos and news reports . Other platforms supported this campaign such as IMDb where the characters had cast pages listing them as missing. This marketing effort was also pushed offline using realistic missing persons posters around American colleges (below), clever by directly placing themselves under the nose of their target audience.
Promotional poster
“Consistent and Cohesive Storytelling” was used to tie the idea of the story of Blair Witch being down to the audience to follow together by making sense of all the information they have been given across platforms.
Both the original 1999 Blair Witch Project and the 2016 remake use “Interactive Story Experiences” to encourage Transmedia impulse to make the movie into an experience. The website is a clear example of this, where you can read hand-written pages from the character’s journals, watch the ‘found’ first-person shot footage and audio snippets (below). The website extended the story through this, describing in detail, the urban legend of the Blair Witch and giving more biographical information on the missing film-makers, encouraging audiences to take interest beyond the film.
For the 2016 remake, marketing used VR (Virtual Reality), an example of convergence culture where consumers experience has evolved with new media, which really took the audience into the film and creates a complete new experience of awaiting a film’s release. You can immerse yourself in the Blair Witch 360 Web VR experience here: https://www.blairwitch.com/experience/360/. As well as this, in 2016 a yearly Halloween immersive scare maze at Thorpe Park following the story in The Blair Witch Project was launched, its marketing branching out further than just in typical media settings. After not being part of Thorpe Park’s ‘Fright Night’ in 2018, the maze returned in celebration of Blair Witch’s 20th anniversary in 2019 (below).
In 2019, Bloober Team created a psychological survival horror video game based on the Blair Witch, but this time adding to the narrative being set 2 years after the 1999 film which takes place in 1994. “The game follows former police officer Ellis Lynch as he joins the search in Black Hills Forest for a missing boy.” It was published by Lionsgate Games for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, again another example of an interactive story experience using Transmedia.
One way The Blair Witch Project built “Story Communities” was through Message Boards and Chat Rooms, the original place where things would go ‘viral’ when the internet was beginning to grow. Marketers for the film posed as online users and shared the missing person photos and directed visitors to the website which caused conversation and interest to grow. As well as this, the more recent additions to the story such as the Thorpe Park maze may encourage fans to relive the story and keeps the legend alive even 20 years after its original release.
A video case study on Blair Witch and Transmedia
References:
BLOOBER TEAM, 2019. Blair Witch. Kraków, Poland: [viewed 12th October 2020]. Available from: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1092660/Blair_Witch/
HOEFS, L., 2018. Building Transmedia [viewed 12th October 2020]. Available from: https://prezi.com/wnenqadjhmvz/building-transmedia/
STEWART, R., 2016. How the original Blair Witch Project ushered in a new era of viral movie marketing [viewed 12th October 2020]. Available from: https://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/09/23/how-the-original-blair-witch-project-ushered-new-era-viral-movie-marketing
The Blair Witch Project’s Use of Transmedia Storytelling, 2015 by Curtis WEAVER.