The Blair Witch Project. It ruled Sundance, dominates the web, and has the sort of word-of-mouth buzz that any upstart director would kill for. Reviews have declared it everything from the most frightening movie of all time to a landmark achievement that will transform the world of independent film as we know it. So how does Daniel Myrick, who with Eduardo Sanchez wrote, directed and edited Blair Witch, feel about his newfound success? "We're kind of Blaired out," Myrick admits. With the countenance of anyone resigned to answering the same questions innumerable times over the next few weeks, he adds, "We've been living with Blair for three years."

Six years, actually, if you consider the date of the film's inception. That was back in 1993, when Myrick and Sanchez were mere film students at the University of Central Florida instead of independent horror's new golden boys. "We were just hanging out at my apartment, talking about the fact that there hadn't been a good horror film in a while, at least a film that scared us," says Sanchez. "So we went out and rented a bunch of those pseudo-documentaries, like Chariots of the Gods, Return to Boggy Creek and that show In Search Of. We came up with a theory that, when we were kids, we completely believed that these things were real. In fact, we still kind of believe they're real; you have to suspend disbelief just to be scared. But we were thinking, 'How do we scare a sophisticated audience?' And we came up with having the film be completely real from beginning to end."

Presented in the form of lost documentary footage involving three young filmmakers researching the legend of the Blair Witch, the resulting film terrified audiences both savvy to the behind-the-scenes story and unknowing of the film's stratagem (see review). While horror has long had a tradition of exceptional low-budget movies (Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre bearing similar genre-redefining qualities), Blair Witch's approach stands as both unique and shockingly effective. Shot mainly on video for the price of "a fully-loaded Ford Taurus", the film more often than not benefited from its minuscule budget. "The job was not really in the production values, it was in the casting and editing," says Myrick. "Getting a logistical arrangement to allow the performances of these people to be as natural as humanly possible and have them maintain our narrative structure that we had scripted prior to shooting."

This is not to say the shoot itself was easy; in fact, for cast and crew it was arduous both physically and emotionally. "We were tromping through the woods many times just like, 'I hope this is working; I hope this is working,'" recalls Myrick. "And you're never really sure until you put it together."

"But at the same time, we felt incredibly blessed, and incredibly lucky," adds Sanchez. "One time Dan and I were walking back from one of the locations, and I'm like, 'You know, man, we may be completely no names, and we have no money, and we're in major debt with our credit card, and he's in his 30s and I'm in my late 20s and we have no families, no lives, no cars, nothing. But Steven Spielberg could not be doing what we're doing right now.' He could not be experiencing this kind of filmmaking; he's just too huge. We still didn't know what we're doing but at least we were experiencing something which was pretty unique."

"Blair was the last hurrah for us," Myrick continues. "We either hit it with Blair, which was our best idea to date, the most quintessential independent film that we could come up with, and if it doesn't raise any eyebrows, then we're going back to wedding videos. It really was our last at bat. If it didn't happen, we were kind of like 'OK, maybe we weren't really meant to be filmmakers.' Fortunately, so far it's been going pretty well." But as the film's release date approaches (July 16th in major cities; July 30th nationwide), it look like "pretty well" doesn't even begin to cover it.