Everything about the Blair Witch Project has been imitated, parodied, or just ripped-off. The "found footage" premise has become a cliche in the horror genre, the shaky cam mockumentary style has been done to death, but it's the viral marketing campaign that hasn't been successfully repeated and probably never will. Love it or hate, Blair Witch Project was a one-of-a-kind experience. It was the product of a particular time when the internet was just big enough to spread rumors, but not quite big enough to dispel them.

Best Viral Marketing Campaign of All Time According to Forbes and pretty much everyone else, The Blair Witch Project marketing campaign is considered not only one of the first, but also the best. The marketers behind this horror flick were able to generate big buzz for a movie with a teeny budget by using Web sites and message boards to stoke interest in the flick months before its release in the summer of 1999. Was the story of young documentary makers lost in the woods true or false?

Seriously. People thought it was real. This was 1999, the internet was newfangled and slow, and still kind of a novelty rather than the essential utility it has become in all of our lives. So when you saw the trailer that ended with the tag www.BlairWitch.com, you might have plugged the phone line into your desktop PC and dialed-up the Net to check it out. When the page finally loaded, you would have been met with an entire contrived history of the legend of the Blair Witch and the strange happenings around Burkittsville, Maryland. Fake news articles about child killers and missing campers solidified the case. Maybe you would have attempted a search on Lycos or Yahoo for more information. But, the studio behind the film planted rumors on message boards and even managed to get the SciFi channel to air a fake documentary about the Blair Witch mythology as though it were a real phenomenon.

Information Superhighway! The net in '99 1 of 4 2 of 4 3 of 4 4 of 4

Do you remember 1999? Too old to remember? Not old enough? Boy bands, the Clinton administration, and the impending Y2K apocalypse... Here's a reminder:

Before we all got so cynical and jaded It looks like a documentary, the TV and interwebs say it's real, all of your friends believe it... From SAGIndie: Hoaxes are usually very clichéd, poorly thought out and simply in no way believable but the intricacy and attention to detail behind the hoax for The Blair Witch Project, put it up there with H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds hoax in 1938... Maybe the word-of-mouth marketing provided just enough reasonable doubt to allow us to get caught up in that unforgettable final scene.

'Evidence' from BlairWitch.com 1 of 5 2 of 5 3 of 5 4 of 5 5 of 5

A new genre was created A $20,000 movie raked in $249,000,000 making it the most profitable movie in history. So of course, there have been imitators.

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