In the year The Blair Witch Project debuted, the movie’s filmmakers were desperately looking for their stars. They passed out “missing person” flyers of the three main actors at the Sundance Film Festival, pleading for those with information to call a local sheriff. The film’s website featured reels of policemen giving interviews about their investigation, while the IMDb page listed the actors as “missing, presumed dead.”
Only, the actors were not dead, or missing. Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard—who, per their contract, used their real names in the film—were alive, but forced to lay low for months to convince fans that the film’s horrors were real. It was one of the first instances of viral marketing for a movie, and it was wildly successful.
