#28: Eight Days in the Woods
When The Blair Witch Project came out in 1999, it blew away horror fans and terrified everyone else. Many people thought it was a real-life found footage film due to the way it was shot and the fact that the actors used their real names. As it turns out, the filmmakers intended for the line between reality and fiction to be blurred for the viewer.
Most of the dialogue between the three actors was improvised. Each day of filming, the cast was given a short brief outlining the general direction of the story, and that was it. To make things even more improvised, the actors weren’t allowed to discuss their individual briefs with each other. In addition, each actor filmed their own footage with a handheld camera and all of their reactions are real, improvised, and visceral. This risky method of filmmaking paid off, because now The Blair Witch Project is a cult classic of horror.