It was surreal at Cannes in May, when they were on a panel moderated by critic Roger Ebert, with Ron Howard at one end of the dais, Spike Lee on the other and John Sayles in between.

And it was surreal at Sundance in January, when "The Blair Witch Project" made its triumphant world premiere at the most influential film festival in America.

"The whole thing was surreal," recalled Myrick over breakfast the morning after the Charles event. "[You've] just come from Orlando, you're knee deep in snow and you're looking at this huge line outside for your film and you're like, 'Wow.' You're just in this daze. And you only hope that the film is going to live up to the hype that's been generated on it, and that the people waiting in line won't be disappointed."

They weren't. "The Blair Witch Project" proved to be the most talked-about film at Sundance this year. Not only was it the first movie to be picked up -- by Artisan Entertainment -- but even sophisticated festival-goers came home shaken by the film, which is a scary movie on the order of the great scary movies of the 1960s and 1970s. No gore or special effects -- "The Blair Witch Project," which opened in theaters Friday, scared filmgoers out of their seats with old-fashioned suspense, atmosphere and decidedly creepy realism.

Myrick, 35, and Sanchez, 30, made "The Blair Witch Project" in 1997, filming in Seneca Creek State Park, Patapsco State Park, Burkittsville, Brunswick and Adamstown. They chose Western Maryland because Sanchez, who grew up in Takoma Park, lived nearby, in Rockville.

Sanchez and Myrick had met in the early 1990s, while they were film students at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. They shared a common passion for Z-grade mock-documentaries like "The Legend of Boggy Creek" and the television series "In Search Of." So they decided to make a film together that would be a homage to those horror flicks of yore, the ones whose terror lay in the ambiguity between fact and fiction.

"The Blair Witch Project" is the story of three student filmmakers who venture into the Maryland woods to make a film about a legendary witch and are never heard from again. The film and video footage they leave behind becomes the movie, giving "The Blair Witch Project" its creepy verite immediacy.

Myrick and Sanchez auditioned 2,000 actors in New York before casting Heather Donahue, Michael Williams and Joshua Leonard as the three filmmakers. They brought them to Maryland and put them through a two-day crash course in film and video-making. Then a crew of seven and the cast of three embarked on a grueling six-day exercise in what Myrick and Sanchez came to call "method filmmaking."

Maximizing terror

For maximum terror, Myrick and Sanchez knew "The Blair Witch Project" had to be flawlessly authentic, with no trace of artifice, performance or predictability. So, to heighten the film's realism, the directors sent their actors on an improvisational journey. They gave them a minimum of information and put a variety of startling events (or "gags") in their way. Then the actors captured each others' responses on camera.

The crew stayed close but out of sight, communicating minimally with the cast. Myrick and Sanchez gave the actors a two-way radio and a hand-held global positioning system as links to the outside world. Fresh batteries, new tapes and performance notes were left at a designated point every day.

Of course, this pared-down approach made not only artistic but economic sense: Myrick and Sanchez funded "The Blair Witch Project" almost entirely on credit cards. The movie, whose budget was equivalent to "the cost of a fully-loaded Taurus," according to Sanchez, was shot in eight days.

"We had a base camp which had to be in radio contact with the three actors, to make sure that if somebody broke an ankle or something they'd be nearby," Myrick recalled. "I did a lot of running in the woods and shadowing the actors, just to kind of observe the performance and see how their dynamic was working. ... We were in full camouflage so they wouldn't see us, or if they were shooting the camera I wouldn't be standing there in a polo shirt in the background. And then whenever we needed to pull one of the gags, like run around the tent, it was all of us going out there at 3 in the morning and sneaking up to the tent and running around. So it was like a little military operation."

Myrick and Sanchez credit co-producer Gregg Hale, who had been in the U.S. Army Special Forces, with coordinating the complex series of moves with military precision. Indeed, Myrick is still shocked that nothing more serious than a broken camera lens befell the filmmakers.

"When you think about having your actors shoot your movie, having them carry 50-pound packs through the woods for six days, that nobody got hurt or got poison ivy, or that the (16-mm film) camera wasn't destroyed, it just amazes me," said Myrick. "I've been on sets that are all controlled, you've got 42 people running around keeping things in order and guards and first aid people and firemen and all this, and Murphy's Law is just slamming you all day long. And we've got, like, seven crew members and the actors are out in the woods, and nobody got hurt!"

Bewitching tale

"The Blair Witch Project" has been sparking lots of talk since Sundance about how convincingly it blurs the lines between fact and fiction, but even before Myrick and Sanchez began editing, the story began to captivate the credulous.

When an eight-minute trailer -- a collection of scenes culled from the movie before it was completely edited -- appeared on John Pierson's "Split Screen" program on the Independent Film Channel in 1997, Myrick received a phone call from a detective in Albany who had worked hours and couldn't come up with anything on the lost filmmakers.

Since June last year, when Myrick and Sanchez created the Blair Witch Web site (www. blairwitch.com) that elaborated the Blair Witch myth, the legend has attracted fans of the occult, the bizarre and the just plain spooky. The Maryland Historical Society has received more than a dozen inquiries about "the only known existing copy of 'The Blair Witch Cult,' " a supposed collection of primary sources on the witch that the Web site says is "on display" at the museum.

A friend of actor Leonard's was reportedly despondent when he saw "The Blair Witch Project," convinced that he had just witnessed the disappearance of his old schoolmate. A counselor involved with missing children contacted the Maryland Film Festival after receiving a call asking about the case.

Artisan has gone out of its way to increase the confusion, creating a new Web site in April with even more back story and mythology, and co-producing a tantalizingly authentic promotional film, "Curse of the Blair Witch," which explored the Blair Witch mythos and the disappearance in detail and aired on the Sci-Fi Channel last week.

But at the Charles screening, Myrick and Sanchez were completely up front about the fictional nature of their work. "We don't want to lie to anybody," Sanchez insisted the next morning. "I mean, it's one thing having Artisan playing it one way, but as filmmakers, we can't go and say, 'Yeah it's real.' "

Still, Myrick said, even when he and Sanchez insist that the Blair Witch is a product of their imaginations, some people refuse to believe them.

Appeal of fear

If "The Blair Witch Project" is about anything, it's about the primal desire to believe in forces out of human control. And it's about the urge to explore those forces even at their most malign and frightening. Using the most rudimentary elements of filmmaking, "The Blair Witch Project" taps into the seductive appeal of fear, which is as alive in 40-year-olds as in 10-year-olds.

"I think people just love emotional responses," Myrick said by way of explanation. "I think it's a break from their everyday, humdrum lives. ... You go in [to a movie] to be in love, you go in to cry, you go in to be excited, you go in to be scared, they're all just primal emotions that you just don't experience when you're going 9 to 5 and you're doing your accounting job and you come home, you know? That's all being scared is, it's just one of those things you just tap into that you don't get to experience too often, and it's why you sit around campfires and tell spooky stories."

In an era when the ante seems to be upped exponentially each time Hollywood releases a "Scream" or "I Know What You Did Last Summer," and in which the audience has become increasingly jaded, "The Blair Witch Project" frightens precisely because it disregards the ante entirely. "We just came up with a new trick," explained Sanchez. "Or we just basically took a trick from a long time ago when they didn't have the effects, and we're using it now."

"We've had a lot of people tell us, 'I thought I didn't like horror movies until I saw your movie,' " said Myrick. "Because it's a different kind of horror. It lets you use your imagination, and I think that's all a really good comedy does or a really good love story does, is let people engage in your movie."

"When it comes down to it, Hollywood, when they make 'Scream,' it's not to scare people, it's for box office," added Sanchez. "That's their main goal. ... But with 'Blair,' our main thing, it wasn't for box office, it wasn't to put Top 10 artists on the soundtrack, it wasn't to sell T-shirts. It was to scare people. "

With that observation in mind, Myrick and Sanchez have signed a three-picture deal with the tiny Artisan Entertainment. "What we want ... is kind of to keep it as much on our terms as possible," explained Sanchez. "We'd rather make smaller films and have more control than step into a $30 million picture and have 12 producers telling us what to do."

Still, the team isn't entirely immune to the blandishments being thrown their way. If the Hollywood machinery is made to make money, it's also made to co-opt young people like Myrick and Sanchez, who have proved to be not only imaginative and resourceful artists but also canny team players in the marketing push. A "Blair Witch" book, comic book, CD and "making of" video documentary are in the pipeline, all with the filmmakers' blessing. When they return to Orlando, where their company, Haxan Films, is based, they will move their office to a bungalow on the lot at Disney's Florida studio.

Currently in negotiations to write a television series, the team is experiencing full force the flavor-of-the-month syndrome. "It's crazy," said Myrick. "I mean, one minute you're trying to get somebody to see your stuff, and the next minute they're throwing money at you just to think of something. You know, it's America!"

For a minute there, we thought he was going to say "surreal."

Pub Date: 07/18/99