Filmmakers disappear for all sorts of reasons. Eccentric geniuses like Kubrick and Malick are known for taking many years between projects and working in complete secrecy. Actors (Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando) and writers (Dalton Trumbo, Stephen King) may dabble with one-and-done efforts and never return to the director’s chair. An Ed Burns may make a big splash with his debut, churn out a series of increasingly lame follow-ups, and eventually find himself releasing his films directly to iTunes.
For this inaugural edition of Vanishing Act, we set the wayback machine for the summer of 1999, when Blair Witch mania swept the nation. Unknown filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez hit upon an ingenious plan for making the most of their microscopic budget, using the mockumentary format to not only justify their jittery digital images but to amp up the "you are there" horror of three amateur filmmakers encountering evil in the woods. The Blair Witch Project was also a pioneer in the realm of viral marketing, using the web to generate underground buzz over whether or not the film was "real." Its influence can be seen in two movies releasing this week: Teeth explicitly mentions Blair Witch in its TV ads, while Cloverfield appropriates both the shakycam immediacy and the viral approach.
When Blair Witch grossed an astonishing $140 million at the box office, it seemed that Myrick and Sanchez were sitting pretty. They had the good sense to steer clear of the stinkeroo sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, except as nominal executive producers. Their next announced collaboration, Heart of Love, was to be a complete change of pace, a screwball comedy described by Myrick in several interviews as "the most politically incorrect movie imaginable." Several web sites (now long defunct) were launched in hopes of recapturing the viral magic of their first collaboration, but the movie’s production was delayed over and over while the directors squabbled with distributor Artisan over Blair Witch profits and the project died quietly.
Despite their tiff with Artisan and mutual antipathy toward the failed Book of Shadows, Myrick and Sanchez toyed with making a Blair Witch prequel before finally going their separate ways. So what have they been up to lately?
This 2005 profile of Sanchez from the Baltimore City Paper finds him in pre-production on Probed, an “alien sci-fi horror monster movie” that was released straight to DVD as Altered in 2006. In a three-skull review (I think that’s a good thing), Fangoria.com notes that the effects-based set pieces are “a far cry from the psychological terrors of Blair Witch,” but that “Sanchez’s work on Altered shares with that previous film a keen sense of downward-spiral pacing.”
Myrick directed The Strand, which originally appeared as a series of webisodes about oddball characters on Venice Beach, CA, and Believers, a straight-to-video thriller about a dangerous cult. In this recent interview, Myrick discusses his new project The Objective, as well as the possibility of working with Sanchez again and maybe even reviving that Blair Witch prequel.