The Academy Museum Recreated ‘The Blair Witch Project’ Website… And You Can Still Explore It Yourself

One of the coolest things shown during the Academy Museum’s preview of The Horror Show wasn’t a monster or a bloody prop. It was a website.

The museum has recreated the original promotional website for The Blair Witch Project, letting visitors revisit the missing filmmakers, disturbing backstory, and supposed evidence that helped turn a little found-footage movie into a phenomenon. According to the Academy Museum, visitors can browse the site inside a haunted-living-room installation in the exhibition’s “Ghosts” section.

And I remember this thing extremely well.

It’s hard to explain just how effective this was if you weren’t there. You weren’t simply visiting a movie website to watch a trailer. You were digging through what looked like information about three missing people and the terrifying local history they had been investigating.

The campaign asked you to entertain the possibility that the footage was real before you ever bought a ticket.

While most of us associate the site with the movie’s 1999 release, co-director Eduardo Sánchez told VICE that it actually launched in June 1998, before Sundance.

Speaking with ComicBook, Sánchez recalled that the filmmakers already had around 10,000 people on their mailing list when they arrived at the festival. People were reading the mythology, asking questions, and building their own sites about it. That audience was forming before the theatrical marketing machine really kicked in.