The Blair Witch Project's co-directors scare up interest in their horror film by terrorizing conventions

Darkness falls: Blair Witch co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez (above) and co-star Heather Donahue (right)

The co-directors of The Most Terrifying Movie of the Decade are enjoying a giggle at their interviewer's expense. This is because I have just admitted to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, who are talking up The Blair Witch Project by phone from Maryland, that I unwittingly perpetuated their faux documentary's spirited hoax two years ago, writing in an A List blurb that "the horrifying footage of three missing filmmakers" was being "unearthed and unspooled" on an episode of John Pierson's Split Screen cable series. The truth is that Pierson--who had initially been duped by the "found" footage himself--ran portions of the pair's pseudo-supernatural "investor tape" to help them scare up financing for Blair Witch, their proposed work of fiction about a documentary film crew's wilderness nightmare. "That [early] tape was mainly designed to catch the interest of dentists and other potential investors," says Myrick. "The idea was to say, 'Okay, so you believed that was real? Well, we're raising money to make a feature that'll be just as scary.'"

The strategy worked and then some: The Split Screen segment, in which the fictional filmmakers stumble upon some menacing stick figures hung from trees in the woods of Maryland (a shiver-inducing scene that's repeated in the feature), not only enabled Myrick and Sanchez to scrounge up a $30,000 budget but sparked a debate over the clip's authenticity on Pierson's Web site. (The renowned indie-film advocate and Split Screen host is duly credited in the movie as "Phase One Instigator.") This led in turn to a cult-level buzz in January at Sundance, where The Blair Witch Project sold to Artisan Entertainment for a reported $1.5 million--in addition to fooling some more viewers. "We don't apologize for it," says Sanchez of the film's tricky conceit, acknowledging that he has encountered a few pissed-off festival attendees who believed the movie was real until the end credits. "The thing is that the film is meant to scare you."

All this might merit a mere footnote to the clichéd horror of indie survivalism were the movie itself not so ingeniously conceived and executed. The finished Project, ostensibly completed by a rather brilliant editor, appears at once authentic, ambiguous, and genuinely disturbing, as the filmmaking characters' handheld Hi-8 and 16mm cameras swirl vertiginously around the same unsparing patch of wilderness and eventually happen upon a remote and run-down cabin--the classic nightmare scenario. The Blair Witch Project's violently elliptical editing--dictated, naturally, by the harrowing circumstances--brings the viewer back again and again to sudden darkness and the threat of horrible death, as the starving and sleep-deprived protagonists (Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams) sit in their tent hearing faint cackles, howls, and what sounds like the cracking whip from hell, until daylight brings another bad, bloody omen.