A closer look
Marketing executives for the 1999 indie horror film The Blair Witch Project ran such a convincing promotional campaign using fake police reports and missing persons posters that even the actors' mothers received condolence cards from terrified neighbors. The studio explicitly hid the cast from the press to maintain the illusion that the found-footage movie was a genuine documentary about dead students, completely ignoring the ethical implications of convincing the American public that three kids were murdered in the woods. This masterpiece of early viral marketing proves that people have always been desperately eager to believe the absolute worst things they read on the internet, and that Hollywood will gleefully exploit human gullibility if it means turning a microscopic budget into a massive box office phenomenon
