Blair Witch

His work on "The Blair Witch Project" has given Neal Fredericks' name some notoriety. Now he's hoping his latest film, "Dreamers," will do the same for his skills."

BURKITTSVILLE -- A specter haunts the picture postcard hamlet of Burkittsville in the Civil War country of Frederick County and its name is "The Blair Witch Project.""The Blair Witch Project" is the summer's surprise superhit movie, a candidate for the scariest film to screech out the millennium with. Made for about $30,000 by a pair of post-graduate Gen-X moviemakers, the "B.W. Project" has racked up $36.1 million in three weeks at a rate that makes "The Runaway Bride" look like she's in a crawl space.

"The Blair Witch Project" is doing more than giving audiences the creeps. It's also heralding a whole new approach to marketing the movies -- over the Internet."We really did no TV advertising until this week," says Daniel Myrick, co-director of the film that's positioning itself to be one of the most successful independent films ever. "Ninety percent of the good word of mouth that's been generated about the film has been generated through the Web."Not that marketing movies over the Internet is something new; film studios have been creating Web sites for their new releases for years; Warner Bros.

"The Blair Witch Project," the mock-documentary horror film set in the woods of Western Maryland, has become one of the best investments in movie history.The no-budget horror movie is poised to cross the $100 million mark in box office this weekend. With its minuscule budget, it's given its backers a better dollar-for-dollar return than such ballyhooed moneymakers as "Star Wars: Episode I -- the Phantom Menace" or "Titanic," which have made more money but cost vastly more to create.At its current gross of $80.2 million, "Blair Witch" has already made several hundred times its production budget.

BURKITTSVILLE -- A car pulls up to the intersection of Main Street and Maryland Route 17, known locally as The Square. The driver, knowing a couple of newspaper types when she sees them, rolls down her window."

Fear and filmmakers were the big attraction at a sold-out benefit screening of "The Blair Witch Project" at Baltimore's Charles Theatre. The filmed-in-Maryland fright flick certainly threw a scare into the audience members, but they loved every minute of it.(For more on the movie's fright quotient, see the "Around Town" item on this page.)After the screening, the movie's makers, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, chatted with the audience about how they created their hair-raising yarn. Then the 450 freaked-out film fans got back to a more rosy reality at a post-show reception.

Just when you thought "The Blair Witch Project" had raised the bar on movie terror about as far as it could go, along comes "The Sixth Sense," a smart, sophisticated and sensitive film that is also, by the way, very spooky.Written and directed with remarkable assurance and visual elegance by 28-year-old M. Night Shyamalan, "The Sixth Sense" wouldn't seem to have much in common with "Blair Witch." Where "Blair Witch" starred a cast of unknowns, "The Sixth Sense" is a vehicle for none other than Bruce Willis; where "Blair Witch" is visually spare, "The Sixth Sense" is rich to the point of opulence; where "Blair Witch" has the jangly energy of an actor's improvisation exercise, "The Sixth Sense" is exquisitely and carefully choreographed.

Part of what made the "Blair Witch Project" so scary was that moviegoers never saw whatever was stalking those kids through the woods. Lately, Washington and the Pentagon have been using the same technique to raise blood pressure over the military's plan to buy new warplanes.While budget fights focus on the $62.7 billion F-22 fighter program, the unseen bugaboo making everyone nervous is another jet: the Joint Strike Fighter.Generals warn that terrible things will happen to the Joint Strike Fighter if the nation doesn't also build the F-22.

What is microcinema? Is it a movement or a philosophy? A budget or an aesthetic? Digital or analog? A very small room or an expanded state of mind?The answers will surely be at hand at this year's MicroCineFest, a five-night marathon of no-budget short and feature films that represents the originality and quirky production values that have come to be known as microcinema.Almost every genre will be represented, from science fiction to horror to drama to musical comedy. The films range from the aesthetically and politically radical ("How to Make a Revolution in America")

Joe Knight will be driving up from Florida. Jack Wells is coming from California. And Buddy Deane will be phoning from his home in Arkansas.They and more than a dozen other personalities from Baltimore's radio and television past will be converging on the WCBM studios Sunday for an on-the-radio reunion its organizer promises will recapture all the old glory."

Cloverfield is The Blair Witch Project for the post-Sept. 11 generation, a first-person, hand-held camera exploration of terror that's long on style and technique, short on substance and plot. Like Blair Witch, Cloverfield purports to be a found videotape. Only this time, in keeping with an America where terror has become all too real, the tape reveals not ephemeral ghosts, but flesh-and-blood invaders. Introduced as some sort of government exhibit, found in the area known as "Central Park" (their quote marks, not mine)

Meta movie moment What: MICA and Maryland Film Festival present a documentary film series. Where: The Brown Center, 1301 Mount Royal Ave. When: 7:30 p.m. Monday. Why: Because it is showing two fake documentaries -- back to back. First up is Curse of the Blair Witch, a 40-minute documentary-style film that tells the "back story" of The Blair Witch Project. Eduardo Sanchez, the Maryland-reared director of this and The Blair Witch Project, will be on hand for a Q&A. Also showing will be Forgotten Silver, a film shown on New Zealand television about a man who invented many of the filming techniques used today -- all fiction of course.

PARK CITY, Utah - JT Petty eats the same burrito for three days. "I'm pathologically frugal," the Severna Park filmmaker said at the Sundance Film Festival this week. "It impresses everybody but my girlfriend." But Petty might have outdone himself in writing and directing Soft for Digging, a horror movie that made it to Sundance on a measly $6,000 budget. The actual tally on his receipts was $5,700, but Petty said he was just being conservative. He shot the movie for his New York University film school thesis three years ago in the woods near Elkton.

Here's a movie you won't want to take grandma to see. Cannibal Holocaust, a film so grisly it was widely banned upon its 1979 release, is coming to the Charles tonight, courtesy of the Maryland Film Festival. The story of four filmmakers who vanished while making a documentary about South American cannibals holds little back. (The conceit - this is the footage they shot, found six months after they disappeared - sounds more than a little like The Blair Witch Project, doesn't it?) "This is not an imitation," the film's tagline promises.

LET'S BAN movie critics from reviewing historical films. That way, we'll make their lives - and ours - easier to sit through. Film criticism is a noble profession, focusing on an exciting and vibrant art form. But critics and I often are on different wavelengths. Any film universally panned by critics, I'm sure to like. Those that most critics praise, I'm sure to detest. I first became leery of critics years ago, when I went to see "Picnic at Hanging Rock" at the Charles. The plot was about three girls who mysteriously disappear on a picnic.

OK, so "Blair Witch 2" was a bust, both commercially and critically. Despite that, the local film community had a banner year in 2000. And that goes both for people watching and people making movies. Certainly the highlight of the year was April's second annual Maryland Film Festival, which dismissed any thoughts of a sophomore slump with a schedule that, if anything, highlighted an even greater variety of films than 1999's inaugural effort. With a slate that included everything from local underground filmmakers to "Lawrence of Arabia," from magic lantern shows to the legendary Kuchar Brothers, there were plenty of reasons to pitch a tent at the Charles and spend an entire weekend in front of a movie screen.

For anyone who remembers the shrieks and hysteria that greeted "The Exorcist" in movie theaters in 1973, the biggest shock registered by the recent rerelease of William Friedkin's horror landmark wasn't on the screen. In the darkness of the multiplexes, there was a good deal of snickering among younger moviegoers who were raised on satanic legions of "Exorcist" clones, a bloody tide of slasher movies, and the more sly, hip and self-referential horror pictures and parodies of the '90s. They were plainly not disposed to cower under the seats at the sight of Linda Blair launching salvos of green pea soup at the priests trying to dispossess her. For Hollywood studios and filmmakers, the question of just how - or even whether - you can scare a contemporary audience is itself becoming increasingly scary and elusive.

The stock market will rebound when the next president is elected, whoever. Save your Confederate euros. Europe will rise again. Downtown is now so popular, they have to tear it down to build garages for the people who must drive there. AT&T is going the way of former Yugoslavia, breakup into four puny little republics. They found the Blair Witch. It kills by making movies.

Thursday night, four busloads of contest winners and their guests left Towson Commons and headed off to watch the Baltimore preview of "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2" at Gwynns Falls Trail, where some scenes from the movie were filmed. Among those on the bus was Tricia Bishop, a Sun staffer. When Bishop didn't show up for work Friday, the authorities were notified. Just before sunset, searchers found these pages, which had been torn from her notebook: 6:30 p.m. - I can't wait. I recently saw the first "Blair Witch" movie, and I'm a whole-hearted fan of it all: the Web-based marketing, the deceptive title as documentary, the invisible antagonist, the unscripted ad-lib by actors in the forests of Burkittsville.

BURKITTSVILLE - Witch-seeking fanatics swooped into town carrying video cameras, tromping through residents' yards, even stealing souvenir dirt from the cemetery to auction it off on the Internet. That was the craze created by the movie "The Blair Witch Project" when it opened last summer. Don't blame residents for not leaping in ecstasy tonight - when the sequel opens. "We wish it would just go away," said Debby Burgoyne, who at first invited tourists to use her bathroom last year, because there are no public facilities in town.