Curse of the Blair Witch proved a believable, compelling, and ultimately successful marketing device for The Blair Witch Project. They made the decision to compile all the interview footage into a separate, shorter film and present it as a real documentary which they used to preview the Blair Witch Project. Directors Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick decided they had captured enough "found footage" to use as a stand alone film without framing the story as a professionally produced documentary.
All of this interview/investigation footage was originally intended to be included in the theatrical release co-mingled with the "found footage" scenes shot by Heather, Mike, and Josh. The documentary was professionally narrated and went into much deeper detail on some of the events that occur in the subsequent "found footage" movie. The (fake) documentary features interviews with various experts on local folklore, local history, townspeople, scientists, academics and law enforcement, all of whom were actors, discussing the "legend of the Witch", various theories on the filmmaker's disappearance, and discovery of their film all of which was completely fictitious. Other missing scenes include several missing interviews with Burketsville residents, including the key scene revealing Rustin Parr's method of making children face the corner.Ī separate documentary-style film, Прокляття відьми з Блер (1999), created by the same directors, was released as a 44 min introduction to the story and was broadcast on Sci-Fi (now SyFy) on July 11th, 1999, two weeks before Blair Witch was released in theaters by Artisan.
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While much of this footage was later worked into the mockumentary Curse of the Blair Witch, pirated versions of this unreleased version of the film did circulate when the movie was still in theaters, varying slightly from the theatrical version. There were also scenes showing the foundation of Rustin Parr's house where geology students had been digging and come across the footage under several layers of undisturbed soil and ash from when the house had been torched in the 1940's and an expert explaining the footage could never have been placed there without disturbing and mixing the layers of ash and soil. An unreleased version of the movie started with an explanation, revealing scenes of a police investigation, a room with a table displaying all the tapes and camera equipment with evidence tags. The beginning of the movie states in a title card that the students went missing and a year later the footage was found but doesn't explain where or who found it. Toward the end of the film, Josh suggests that the reason Heather is "still making her movie" is because it allows her to disassociate from the reality of the situation the danger and hopelessness are less real if she is only watching them through a camera lens as a movie, not something which she is a part of. Mike even has to stop her from recording Josh's breakdown, and throughout the film a major source of conflict among the group is the fact that Heather just won't turn the camera off. Her motivation for obsessively documenting everything becomes less and less clear, and throughout the film she gets a lot of footage she couldn't reasonably expect to use even if they did manage to get out of the woods, such as her and Josh violently berating and briefly physically attacking Mike for destroying the map, and multiple instances of herself sobbing, during which she makes sure the camera is pointed at her. Heather seems to be filming almost constantly for the whole time they are in the woods, long after almost anyone would have stopped.