Extreme lengths Blair Witch Project actors took to convince fans they were dead in real life

Behind the scenes of The Blair Witch Project, the iconic 1999 horror that popularised the found footage genre, the actors were made to go to extreme lengths to convince fans it was real.

The beloved horror is one full of fascinating stories in front of the camera and behind it. Just this week, fans spotted that the film actually shows the witch, and no one even realised.

The 1999 found footage film stars Rei Hance, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C Williams as a trio of students who go into the woods to try and create a film about the ‘Blair Witch incidents’ before themselves becoming victims of the witch.

Hance, Leonard, and Williams were unknown actors rather than celebrities, with the producers of the film making it from a measly budget of just $35,000. Marketing for the film made out that it was genuinely found footage, accentuated by the fact no one had heard of the main trio.

Spoiler alert below for a 26-year-old movie!

What lengths were the actors made to go to in order to convince fans they were dead?

The found footage film is now a horror classic (Artisan Entertainment)

The main trio are all implied to be killed off by the end of Blair Witch Project.

This meant that, if the marketing of it being genuinely found footage were to work, fans had to more or less be convinced that the actors who starred in the film were dead.

Hance (who at the time went by Heather Donahue), Leonard, and Williams were all made to agree to incredibly restrictive constraints, namely, not doing any more acting work and essentially fall off the face of the Earth so people would think they had really been killed off by the witch.

Artisan Entertainment acquired the film for over $1 million at the Sundance Film Festival, and barred a publicist hired by Hance from booking any interviews. They even slammed Leonard for booking a role in an independent movie, as it would reveal he was an actor (and alive).

With internet access in 1999 not as prevalent as it is today, many genuinely believed the film was real - added to by a fake documentary released that interviewed 'relatives' of the supposedly missing people featured in the film.

Did the Blair Witch Project actors get rewarded for the extreme lengths they went to?

The cast in 1999 (Jeff Kravitz via Getty Images)

In short, no. The actors behind the movie released a joint statement last year demanded they be remunerated properly for the film as they would have been if they had SAG-AFTRA representation at the time of making The Blair Witch Project.

In an interview with Variety, the actors revealed that upon the film breaking $100,000,000 at the box office, the studio simply gifted them fruit baskets. The film made $250,000,000 in total, with them receiving no extra money for its success.

This led each of them to struggle financially despite the film's massive success. Leonard even described an experience in which he worked a catering gig and ended up serving his own agent at an event.

When his agent asked 'what the f*ck' he was doing, he said in the interview: "I said, ‘You know that I haven’t made any money.’ We were all struggling to pay the rent.”

The most recent reboot, announced by Lionsgate, is what prompted them to speak up, having received no consultation or communication.

They revealed that they were not only actors on the project but had been trained to use camera equipment, given prompts by the directors, and dropped off into the woods to film.

The Blair Witch Project is available to watch on Prime Video in the UK.