How a Hollywood director tricked his actors into starring in the Blair Witch sequel without knowing it

Fittingly for a shock horror film, the new Blair Witch perfected the cloak-and-dagger dark art of movie secrecy.

The film was kept so hush-hush during its three-and-a-half year creation that even some crew members thought they were working on a horror flick called The Woods, not knowing it was a sequel to The Blair Witch Project.

The news was kept fully under wraps until director Adam Wingard and collaborator/screenwriter Simon Barrett unveiled Blair Witch at Comic-Con, stealing the San Diego fan convention and generating lots of pre-release excitement. Barrett says the surprise was necessary to minimise expectations and cynicism.

“We didn’t want it to be, ‘We’re making a Blair Witch movie, is that a good or bad idea?’ We wanted the conversation to be, ‘We made a new Blair Witch movie. And we just showed it to you,’ ” Barrett says. “People’s minds were blown.”

It was an appropriate surprise for the terrifyingly realistic Blair Witch Project, which sneaked up and spooked the US and other countries in 1999. The “found-footage” approach, shot on hand-held video cameras by unknown actors seemingly terrorised in the Maryland woods, seemed all too real. With internet hype, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s US$60,000 film turned into a US$248.6 million cultural monster at the worldwide box office.

But Blair Witch as a franchise got lost in the woods. A traditionally shot, critically panned 2000 sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, helmed by Joe Berlinger, maxed out at US$47.7 million globally. Then there were years of silence as inexpensive found-footage franchises dominated horror, from Paranormal Activity to Wingard and Barrett’s V/H/S.

Lionsgate, which owned the Blair Witch rights, approached the duo in 2013 with a top secret found-footage sequel concept involving the younger brother leading friends to find his missing sister Heather Donahue in the cursed woods. The filmmakers, devoted fans of the original, jumped. “It was weird keeping it a secret,” Barrett says. “I was writing a film called The Woods, my contract even said The Woods, and not telling anyone what I was really doing.”