The Blair Witch Project is a low-budget American horror film released in 1999. Though the film is entirely fictional, the narrative is presented as a documentary pieced together from amateur footage. It tells the story of three young student filmmakers (Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams) who go into the Black Hills of Burkittsville, Maryland to film a documentary about the eponymous local legend known as the Blair Witch. The three students never come back. Neither the students nor their bodies are ever found, although their video and sound equipment (along with most of the footage they shot) is discovered a year later. The film was viral marketed heavily via the Internet, and parts of the film were aired on the Independent Film Channel's Split Screen TV series, leading to heated speculation on the Internet as to whether the film was real or not. To reinforce this idea, the Sci-Fi Channel aired a fake documentary, Curse of the Blair Witch, that claimed to investigate the legend surrounding the movie right before the film's release. The program contained interviews with friends and relatives of the missing students, paranormal experts, and local historians (all fabricated, of course). This was done so extensively that the three main actors were listed for a time as "missing, presumed dead" on IMDb. The film was featured in the Guinness Book of Records as having the highest profit-to-cost ratio of a motion picture ever, making back over US$10,000 dollars for every dollar spent.
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