LOS ANGELES – At first, the Word or, as it is called in Hollywood, word of mouth.
For as long as movies have existed, studio marketers have been tirelessly searching for tactics to get other people talking about them. Whether it’s captivating trailers, rave reviews, or recommendations from a contented audience, word of mouth is the engine that can organically turn a little-known movie into a latent hit thanks to the strength of buzz on social media.
In the 1990s, the explosive expansion of the Internet promised to energize the engine into a high-speed global force, extending the success of film marketing campaigns to unexplored corners of what is still strangely called “cyberspace. ” Although virality is still limited to infectious diseases, it took a low-budget, under-the-radar horror film called “The Blair Witch Project” to awaken the industry to the revolutionary prospects of this new tool.
Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez on a shoestring budget of $60,000, “Blair Witch” claimed not to be a fictional story, but real footage found on camcorders left three young filmmakers who disappeared in the woods of Maryland in 1994 while they filmed a documentary. about a mythical local hermit who kidnapped and massacred children. When “Blair Witch” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999, unknown people in the film, who had used their genuine names in the film, were listed as “missing” or “deceased. “
By regaining the film’s distribution rights for $1. 1 million, Artisan Entertainment set about creating a guerrilla-style marketing campaign that would further blur the line between the authentic and the unauthentic. Lacking the financial means of a major studio to run expensive TV ads, Artisan’s marketing team introduced an online page two months before the film’s release that expanded on the mythology of the “Blair Witch” with fictional police reports, newspaper articles, and interviews.
John Hegeman, chief marketing officer at Artisan, genuinely believed in the prospects of the Internet and created the first commercial for the 1994 science fiction film “Stargate. ” While a classic studio-based movie marketing crusade can easily achieve 25 million dollars or more, Hegeman noted that the Internet could deliver the message to an even broader audience, for only a fraction of the cost of print and television ads.
“There are a lot of other tactics to succeed with other people besides throwing cash at them,” Hegeman told the Times in a 1999 interview, noting that total marketing spending before the film’s release amounted to just $1. 5 million. “When other people say something can’t be done, that in itself is motivation enough to say, ‘Yes, it can be done. ‘
A few weeks after its launch, the “Blair Witch” site, updated to stoke the mystery, recorded 3 million daily visits. Artisan prolonged his unsettling marketing crusade with documentary-style trailers that featured raw handheld footage accompanied by frightened voices and screams. Young interns from the company were sent to cafes and dance clubs across the country to ask others what they knew about the legend of the Blair Witch, armed with realistic “missing” posters of the film’s three stars.
By the time “Blair Witch” was released in July 1999, anticipation had reached its peak, and the rest of Hollywood had taken notice. Jim Fredrick, a professor of entertainment marketing at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, was then senior vice president of arts publicity at Warner Bros. and remembers being surprised by the amount of buzz the independent distributor is able to generate. generate through your local operations campaign.
“The whole concept of footage discovered and whether it’s genuine or not is just ingenious,” says Fredrick. “In any big studio you have big marketing budgets and you use studies and tests. Artisan didn’t have that equipment or that money, so they had to look for other tactics: lo and behold, here’s something called the internet and it’s incredibly cheap, if not free. These guys deceived the world, like Orson Welles with [the 1938 radio series] “The War of the Worlds,” and it’s become a phenomenon.
Released in only 27 theaters, “Blair Witch” became an instant sensation among audiences, grossing a staggering $56,000 on screen, despite reports that some moviegoers vomited from the combination of fear and discomfort caused by the shaky stills from the film. movie. By the end of its theatrical run, the film had expanded to over 2,000 theaters and had grossed around $250 million worldwide, more than 4,000 times its original budget, making it one of the most successful independent films. box office of all time.
While the “Blair Witch” filmmakers worked to expand the film into a multimedia franchise that included books, comics, video games and a sequel, others in Hollywood tried to emulate that formula. In the years that followed, films such as “Cloverfield,” “Paranormal Activity” and “The Last Exorcism” borrowed the concept from uncovered photographs with varying degrees of success. But tracing the cultural phenomenon of lightning in a bottle of “Blair Witch” proved tricky as audiences became increasingly aware of this type. of marketing deception.