"Indie Makers Finish Film For Less Than the Price of a Used Car" -- Headline regarding The Last Broadcast as seen in indieWIRE, a favorite magazine of Haxan Films, 8/1/97

"The price of a fully-loaded Ford Taurus." -- Eduardo Sanchez, when asked how much The Blair Witch Project cost, The 11th Hour, 7/11/99

"We made our movie for $900 and nobody believes it," says Avalos. "They see our movie and think we're making it up; that it's some sort of publicity stunt. And it's the truth! We didn't include the cost of cameras or computers, but we already owned those and we still own those. You can't really factor those in. But if I did Last Broadcast for $900, I could have done Blair Witch for $200. There's nothing in it. It's someone walking around with a camera in the woods."

Well, not exactly. Of all the inconsistencies that have appeared in coverage of The Blair Witch Project, none are so startling as the variations in price. Haxan Films has long refused to name the actual cost of the film, comparing it instead to the price of "a new car", "the average new car", or, as they told The 11th Hour last June, a "fully-loaded Ford Taurus." Automotively-challenged journalists have gone on to draw their own conclusions, leading to amounts as divergent as $25,000 (CNN), $30,000 (Newsweek), $35,000 (TIME), $50,000 (USA Today), $60,000 (indieWIRE), and a whopping $100,000 courtesy of the ever-enthusiastic New York Post.

In any case, the budget for Blair is still far less than spent on the average studio production, and considering its $100 million + gross, one would think Haxan would share its price tag with pride. After all, John Pierson -- the independent film guru, Split Screen host, and main financial backer of The Blair Witch Project whose role will be investigated later in this article -- proudly proclaimed on the Grainy Pictures website that the sum budget for Blair's first Split Screen segment came to $93.22. The segment, which contained the original eight-minute Blair trailer as well as after-commentary from Sanchez, Myrick and producer Gregg Hale, ran about 15 minutes long. With Blair's running time clocking in at 87 minutes, it appears that the film could feasibly be produced, as Avalos put it, for $200 -- and at any rate, for less than $100,000, $60,000, or even $30,000.

Continues Avalos, "Everyone's like, `Can you believe it was made for that?' and I'm like, `No, where'd all the money go?'" The answer appears to be found in the The Blair Witch Project special The Curse of the Blair Witch, a mock documentary/promo which debuted on the Sci-Fi Channel July 12, 1999 and was comprised of scrapped footage the Haxan crew shot in the summer of 1998. "Actually, the Sci-Fi special is closer to our original vision of the film than the film that's going to be in theaters," said Sanchez at a roundtable discussion attended by The 11th Hour in June 1999. "It's a more investigative look at the myths and the backstory and it has interviews with the family and friends, experts. It's pretty cool. People who have seen it that have seen the film think it's just as good as the film; it's just a different format."

A format which bears an uneasy resemblance to The Last Broadcast. "I'm pretty sure that they saw our movie, saw how it was constructed, and said, `You know, this sucks, because our movie is almost the same as theirs', "surmises Avalos. "And so then they went back to their movie and changed it, so it would be just the lost footage. Now I think that's a good thing," he adds. "Because if anything, that shows that they're not trying to be a rip-off. And they could have worded it in such a way that it would be like, `Yeah, we saw their movie, and we thought this would work better.' They could even say they changed it because they didn't like our movie or whatever. But they just haven't said anything about it."

As to the changes that took place in the finalizing of The Blair Witch Project during the summer of 1998, this could indeed be the case. But it still doesn't explain the similarities between the initial Blair trailer and the initial Broadcast trailer -- nor does it help elucidate the role of John Pierson in the two films' complicated histories.