In January of 1999, The Blair Witch Project premiered at midnight during the Sundance Film Festival. While not a slated entry, Blair managed to terrify filmgoers and studio heads alike, and a $30,000 film was quickly snatched up by Artisan for a smooth one million. Artisan's no stranger to independent horror: its best-known film was 1998's Pi, which thanks in part to Artisan's aggressive marketing campaign went on to have on its opening day the largest single-screen profit of any independent film in history, a record Blair may well surpass.

For The Blair Witch Project, the studio has, with Myrick and Sanchez, constructed an elaborate promotional scheme that markets the film as a true story. Their comprehensive website has everything from Heather's lost journal to interviews with the victims' "parents". Also forthcoming are a book, a soundtrack (allegedly the mix Josh left in the car before disappearing in 1994, yet it mysteriously contains songs from 1999; chalk it up to that crazy Blair Witch again) and an upcoming Sci-Fi Channel special entitled Curse of the Blair Witch which premieres July 12th. This special is part of a mythology the filmmakers hope to cultivate further.

"Actually, the Sci-Fi special is closer to our original vision of the film than the film that's going to be in theaters," Sanchez reveals. "It's a more investigative look into the myth and the backstory." A backstory which has grown increasingly elaborate since the film's conception: "If it's going to be a documentary rather than a fictional film, then there has to be a purpose," explains Myrick. "The folklore is pretty derivative of everybody's own folklore they heard growing up. I had a UFO club when I was 13," he adds, "Me and three other guys; our office was in my closet. We loved the spookiness of looking for UFOs. We had a Bigfoot in our woods out back. Everyone I've talked to has got some witch on the hill or haunted house on the road. There's some kind of Civil War ghost roaming the mountains.

"We just kind of made this hybrid, generic folklore that applies to everyone's own inherent sensibilities and just made it our own," he continues. "We kept it not detailed enough for anyone to say 'I would have heard about that.' That ambiguity applies to the film itself." It also allows room for projects beyond Curse of the Blair Witch, namely, a sequel. "Artisan definitely wants to entertain the thought of a sequel," Myrick admits. "The good news is that Blair has so much mythology involved in it that we can explore a bunch of different areas, prequels or sequels."

But don't expect either any time soon. Sanchez and Myrick, currently working on a comedy that they had conceived long before Blair Witch, are understandably weary of the all-consuming Blair. "We want to kind of put [a sequel] on the backburner for a while, see how the real Blair Witch does," says Myrick. "But if we do revisit it in a couple of years or whatever, we want to do it with the same spirit of Blair and not try to recreate what we did here. I don't think that should be done again, at least from us. But maybe explore it in a more traditional narrative format, the Elly Kedward story, or Rustin Parr." For those who don't know, Elly Kedward is the original Blair Witch, banished in 1785 for draining the blood from children. Two-hundred years later, Rustin Parr upped the ick factor by ritualistically murdering children, allegedly at the urge of "an old woman ghost." These characters are only part of Blair's far-reaching mythology.

"I dream about having this group of films, that, in 20 years, you can look at as not just a series where the first one is really good, the second one is all right, and it just got worse and worse," says Sanchez in reference to the possibility of a Blair series. "I want it to be something -- and I don't know how we can control this -- but it would be great to have every single one of the Blair films be a completely different film than anything that came before. Like shoot one of them in black and white, and explore more of the horror genre each time, and try to come up with something cool, something new."