The Blair Witch Project is a low-budget American horror film released in 1999.
Though the film is entirely fictional, the narrative is presented as a documentary
pieced together from amateur footage. The film was produced by the Haxan Films production company.
It tells the story of three young student filmmakers who get lost in the woods
while filming a documentary about the eponymous local legend. After being terrorized
by an unseen presence for several days, they mysteriously disappear, one by one. Neither
the students nor their bodies are ever found, although their video and sound equipment
(along with most of the footage they shot) is eventually recovered.
The release of the film on 30 July 1999 came after months of publicity, including
a ground-breaking campaign by the studio to use the Internet and suggest that the
film was a real event. It was very positively received and went on to gross over
US$248 million worldwide,making it the most successful independent film ever made up to
that point, and the most profitable American film of all time in terms of the ratio of
production cost to box office sales.