"Replete with grainy photos, mock evidence, timelines and journals that burnish the film's pseudo reality, the Web site represents a form of entertainment in itself. And, industry experts say, it is a much more compelling and creative promotional tool than most newspaper ads or TV spots could ever be." -- CNN article on the popularity of the Blair Witch Project website, August, 1999

"FFM Productions' Web site for The Last Broadcast looks anything but low-budget. The Story and Synopsis are fantastic; when we first came upon this site, we thought that the movie was a documentary -- they've done that good a job of creating an extensive background to their story! Okay, so maybe we're just really naive. Either way, this is a site you should definitely check out. Make sure you download the trailer." -- The Wild, Wild, Web, August, 1997

"If I were them, I would have done something a bit different," muses Avalos about the startling similarities between the much-lauded Blair Witch site and that of The Last Broadcast. "Just because people are going to be comparing stuff anyway. They're going to be like, `Hey, these movies are so similar, these storylines are so similar.' So if I was doing a website, I would make it different, so that that wouldn't be another thing that people could say."

Needless to say, the Haxan crew did not heed his advice. Constructed in June of 1998 -- one and a half years after the inauguration of the Broadcast site -- the website for The Blair Witch Project went on to become legendary among filmgoers, studio execs and internet aficionados alike. For the week ending August 1, 1999, 650,000 visitors helped make www.blairwitch.com the 45th most popular site on the internet, with the average visitor spending 16 minutes before logging off. The Blair Witch website has been heralded as a revolutionary use of film promotion; it is also, once again, nearly identical to parts of the Last Broadcast website, which had been promoted on the television series The Wild, Wild Web as early as August of 1997.

Both websites encourage the viewer to believe the respective film is real, with features that include a timeline of fictitious events, biographies of the lost "filmmakers", an introductory summary of the occurrence, fabricated "interviews" with those involved and grainy evidence photos from the "crime scene". Even the fonts and title logos bear a strong resemblance to each other, a fact which carried over to the title logos used in the actual films. And while this has been mentioned in previous articles noting the similarities between the two movies, what hasn't been touched upon until now is the true predecessor of both films' websites: a small website for the documentary film Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills.

A frightening -- and completely factual -- documentary, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's 1996 film details the arrest and trial of three non-conformist teenagers accused of murdering three children. The website details the true events in a timeline form, and a section entitled "aftermath" shows, as it does on the Blair site, what has happened to the parties involved since the tragedy. Unlike the Haxan team, however, Avalos freely admits the influence of the earlier site on his own creation: "I saw that website, and I was like, 'This is great!' So I copied a lot of it, and I'll admit that. No one has ever called us on it, but if someone did, I'd be like, yeah, that was a very influential thing." Avalos pauses and adds, "That's a movie that [Haxan] never mentions either."

Haxan did, however, mention The Last Broadcast's site, although it did so privately and nearly a year before the similarities of Broadcast and Blair were brought to the public eye. The Haxan team had long interacted with their fan base, issuing an informative Haxan newsletter and discussing Blair openly on site message boards before the film had even finished. Among the topics discussed on the original Haxan message board -- now buried beneath layers of the new, commercial Haxan site -- included the following exchange between Blair producer Mike Monello and a rather curious fan with the name "Ao Horus" that took place on 10/29/98 and 10/30/98. The original spelling and grammar of the posts are retained:

Ao Horus: "I just saw The Last BroadCast wednesday night and thought it was excellent. I can't wait to see the finished version of the Blair Witch Project and compare. Even with just the clips I've seen here, I have to say at least the initial `plot' line is extremeley similar. The Last Broadcast is about a cable access crew that go looking for the jersey devil and end up dead. The narrator is a Documentary film maker trying to figure out what happened from the crews video tapes. Despite what the Haxon guys say :> I don't see how it can avoid travelling a different narrative path."

Responds Monello: "On the surface, 'The Last Broadcast' and 'The Blair Witch Project' seem to be similar, but I assure you they are QUITE different (but still check out their web page -- the satalite distribution thing they just did was extremely cool)."

To date, no one from Haxan Films has admitted seeing The Last Broadcast's website to the press; when prodded about the issue, they have referred only to their one-paragraph statement, although Sanchez and Myrick admitted in a recent interview with Diane Sawyer that they had indeed seen Broadcast during the making of Blair. What Haxan has spoke of extensively is the popularity of their own website and the internet promotion that was crucial to the film's success. "Ninety percent of the good word of mouth that's been generated about the film has been generated through the Web," recalls Myrick in a Seattle Times interview from August 5, 1999. An indisputable fact, certainly -- but again, there is more to the Blair Witch story than meets the eye.

Although Blair didn't gain nationwide attention until its premiere at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, it was attracting internet buzz months before. Most notably, it had been promoted on Harry Knowles' Aint-It-Cool-News website, an exceedingly popular film and television gossip source which also features a "Talk Back" section where readers can discuss the topics at hand. Or, as it turns out, where employees of John Pierson can divert attention from The Last Broadcast by hyping Blair Witch, often incorporating purposeful -- one would hope -- bad grammar and slang to create the illusion of a typical, not-in-the-business fan. After an ecstatic post praising Blair by Knowles, the following messages in the "Talk Back" section appeared on January 6, 1999:

1999-01-06 09:11:22

From: Axos

Subject: sounds fishy

Comment: I read about this flick at the Sundance '99 site and the story sounds exactly like that of the movie, "The Last Broadcast," which was shown at last year's ResFest, a digital film fest of sorts. "The Last Broadcast" was apparently shot with various formats i.e. hi8mm, 16mm, and lots of digital video. I think the genre flick at Sundance '99 to keep track of is "The Item", shot on digital video, it's about a bunch of guys guarding a psychic worm-like creature...

Around six hours later, this post appeared:

1999-01-06 15:21:29

From: stefanie

Subject: BLAIR WITCH

Comment: If you are even slightly interested in this film, you got to visit the Blairwitch website...www.blairwitch.com. Gives you the whole backstory, a slideshow of the film and you can read from Heather's journal. It's wacked out ya'll. Ya know what I'm saying tricky rick?

The email address of the poster? stefanie.decassan@geis.ge.com. As in Stefanie DeCassan, the camerawoman for the original Split Screen segment about The Blair Witch Project that aired back in 1997. While a recent article in the online magazine Salon.com claiming The Blair Witch Project had faked its online fan base was met by much protest, one can't help but wonder how much of the positive internet word of mouth the media has lauded was simply planted by those working for Haxan or Pierson.

Avalos, however, is unconcerned about this aspect of Blair's promotion, chalking it up to typical studio tactics. "The thing is, people were all upset about that," he says, referring to the Salon article. "And I'm like, I think that's great! You want a movie that works, make fake fan sites. And people were like, that's not scrupulous and honest, but look, everyone does it." When asked whether he has ever written anything under a pseudonym promoting Last Broadcast, the filmmaker admits, "I've been tempted to. If no one was writing anything about it, I would do it. But people are writing, so I don't need to."

One thing that does bother Avalos is the more recent promotion of Blair, specifically, a commercial created by Artisan that bears an almost exact similarity to one of the Last Broadcast trailers. "I'm looking at the new trailer in the marketing campaign and I'm like, 'What the hell is this?' You can say what you want about when [the movies] were made and all that, but you're talking about marketing that has happened two years after the fact. And if they don't want to be accused of being rip-off artists, then they should not be doing commercials like that. If I were Artisan, I'd watch myself," he adds. "I would do anything I could to make it not the same."

Avalos was also startled by the similarities between the Blair Witch flyers, distributed at film festivals such as Sundance and Cannes, and the Last Broadcast flyers distributed at film festivals the year before. "We had people handing out flyers -- weird flyers, you know? 'Four people went in and one came out -- what really happened?' Our flyers were always set up as fact or fiction," he continues. "The whole fact or fiction issue, it turns out, that's one thing that [Sanchez and Myrick] are always saying -- fact or fiction, fact or fiction. Which, yeah, they can say that, but it's something that came right out of our movie, in a way," he says, referring to the faux cable access show "Fact or Fiction" that stands as the center point of Broadcast. "Of course, that's a term, an expression that's very old, and so it's not like we coined it or anything. But it's still just another thing that we're like, 'Ugh. Fact or Fiction.' You know?" Avalos groans. "Turns out there's a lot of things like that."