Imagine marketing your low-budget independent film by convincing the world that your lead actors are dead. In the dial-up era of 1999, that deception worked. This episode unpacks the origins, the grueling production and the controversial aftermath of The Blair Witch Project, from two University of Central Florida film students in 1993 who noticed that grainy paranormal documentaries scared them more than polished horror, to a website that had logged 160 million hits by August 1999.

The discussion covers the near-anagram mythology of Elly Kedward and Rustin Parr, a 35-page outline with no scripted dialogue, an audition process that cut 2,000 actors to three, and the October 1997 shoot in Seneca Creek State Park where the directors tracked the cast by GPS, left conflicting instructions in film cans, restricted food and harassed them at night. It follows the Sundance midnight premiere, Artisan’s $1.1 million purchase, the fight over four alternate endings, the internet campaign built on fake police reports and missing-person flyers, and the actors’ later lawsuit after receiving only a low five-figure bonus from a film that grossed $248.6 million.

• How the broken mechanical shark in Jaws became the film’s intentional strategy of never showing the monster
• Real human teeth from a Maryland dentist and an art director in white pantyhose behind the film’s scariest moments
• Why the actors used their real names, and what that cost Heather Donahue’s career
• IMDb listing the cast as missing, presumed dead, and the Sci-Fi Channel mockumentary that treated the lore as fact
• The fans who tore apart the Griggs House and the found-footage wave that followed