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I have done nothing but read it to others, and hear others again read it, to me, ever since it came into my Hands; and I find I am likely to do nothing else, for I know not how long yet to come: because, if I lay the Book down, it comes after me. -When it has dwelt all Day long upon the Ear, It takes Possession, all Night, of the Fancy. -It has Witchcraft in every page of it: but it is the Witchcraft of Passion and Meaning.
-Aaron Hill, to the Editor of Pamela'
From the perspective of the American news media, the sudden, phenomenal commercial success of The Blair Witch Project (1999, dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez) represented a story as absorbing and suggestive as the one told by the film itself. In its first weekend of wide release, the film (the directors' first, and the first from their company, Haxan Films) earned nearly $30 million, an amount which according to some estimates represented approximately one thousand times that spent to produce the film.' Per theater earnings for the film's opening week were reportedly the highest ever enjoyed by a nationally-released film.' After only two months of theatrical release, The Blair Witch Project already had become the highest-grossing independent film ever.4 Generally speaking, the media responds to the unexpected, "sleeper" success of films such as The Blair Witch Project with ruminations about best-selling formulas and the mysterious vagaries of popular tastes Such discussions often yield one of two possible conclusions about the cultural product whose surprising success is being investigated: 1) that the product has managed to uncover a new strategy for creating a commercial success, in which case, identifiable aberrations in the product (e.g., of technique) will be instinctively interpreted as "innovative" and therefore crucial to the product's having procured a large audience; 2) that formulas for commercial success are either non-existent or if they do exist they are inaccessible, in which case the product's success will be described as incomprehensible, the result of cultural forces too complex to grasp.
Initial reaction to The Blair Witch Project's success largely followed these two patterns of response, with reviewers and commentators either attributing its popularity to one or more "unique" elements...