Writer’s note: Despite being billed as the original trailer, the embed above was created for its 15th anniversary in 2014. The Blair Witch Project, still one of the best found-footage horror movies of all time, is the movie you need to stream on Netflix before it leaves on May 31. And so, they came up with a novel concept that would define the next two decades of horror cinema: the found footage movie.

The two met as film students at the University of Central Florida in 1993 where they bonded over a fondness for documentaries on paranormal subject matter. They simply believed that truth can be scarier than fiction. The rise of digital engendered a new, rawer language to cinema that slowly spilled to the big screen.īut filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez weren’t trying to tap into the zeitgeist with their hit freshman feature, at least not on purpose. In parallel was the widespread adoption of digital video, a cheaper and easier way to make movies. There was also the meteoric rise of the reality show format, made popular by the gritty, exploitative Cops and the grungy, messy, influential MTV smash hit The Real World.

In the years after Reagan and Bush, the 1990s were a decade characterized by a need for truth, perhaps best epitomized in the runaway success of The X-Files, a show all about unexplained phenomena and the cover-ups that conceal them.

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