The Blair Witch Project has inspired a number of questions about its authenticity:

• The Blair Witch Project is a documentary.
• There is a legend of the Blair Witch.
• The actors were genuinely frightened/tired/etc.

In general, no.

The Blair Witch Project is a documentary. - Not true. The marketers of The Blair Witch Project have gone to great lengths to foster the notion that the movie is a documentary. Unfortunately, however, that is all just savvy marketing. The movie is fiction written by the directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez and starring Heather Donahue, Michael Williams and Joshua Leonard as the hapless college student filmakers.

There is a legend of the Blair Witch. - Not true. Myrick and Sánchez invented everything, with the exception of Burkettsville, Maryland, for the movie. There was no legend of the 'Blair Witch.'

The actors were genuinely frightened/tired/etc. - True. Though Sánchez and Myrick provided a minimal script and some suggestions during filming, the movie is an exercise in method acting. Here a quote from an interview of actor Joshua Leonard:

Salon Magazine: So what's going through your mind after the food diminished and the exhaustion increased? I know they put you in the woods with limited supplies and a lot of unexpected disturbances. Did they really put you in that much anguish to add to the realism?

Joshua Leonard: When we signed on to do the project, one of the first things they told us was, "Your safety is our concern. Your comfort is not." And they made that blatantly clear from the very beginning. You understand that intellectually, but still there's no way to really prepare. When you're on your third PowerBar day, when your cigarettes are gone, when you haven't showered, when you've been kept awake, when you've got a sleep deprivation thing going, when you're exhausted, when there's two inches of rain in the bottom of your tent -- you've got to act. You're wiping your ass with leaves and you're with two total strangers 24 hours a day and there are babies crying outside your tents at 4 in the morning. There's only so much that you can intellectually prepare for, and then you go out and that's where you get the method, that's where you get the reality.

See the rest of the interview here.

• Other commentaries
  • "Something Wicked" from Salon Magazine.
  • "Method Madness" from Salon Magazine.
  • "The Blair Witch Hunt" from the Urban Legend Reference Pages.
  • "Blair Witch FAQ" posted to alt.folklore.urban.

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