`BLAIR WITCH' HUNT SCARES UP ITS OWN LUCK.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Writer

On Oct. 21, 1994, three student filmmakers hiked into Maryland's isolated Black Hills Forest to make a documentary about a local legend called the Blair Witch. They were never heard from again. The footage they shot was found a year later, buried beneath an abandoned house. Those images of their final harrowing days were edited by Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick and turned into ``The Blair Witch Project,'' which opens exclusively at the Nuart Theatre on Friday.

Here's the rub: None of this ever really happened. But that hasn't stopped people from buying into the elaborate mythology that first-time filmmakers Sanchez and Myrick have created around their fictional sorceress. Since ``The Blair Witch Project'' debuted as a midnight movie at the Sundance Film Festival in January, fans have fallen under the film's spell - sometimes in ways that go well beyond normal moviegoing reactions.

When an eight-minute ``Blair Witch'' trailer was shown this spring on the Independent Film Channel, a New York private investigator called the film's Florida production office to offer his services. The man was beside himself with grief.

``He was obsessed with the idea of reopening the case and finding these students,'' says Gregg Hale, one of the film's producers. ``Dan calmed him down and told him it was all a fake - and he loved it. He said he'd be first in line when the movie opened.''

He's going to have plenty of company. After Sundance, ``The Blair Witch Project'' has generated the kind of buzz that no amount of marketing can buy. Quite simply, it's the most-anticipated independent film of the year. And that distinction has as much to do with the movie's made-up legend as it does its undeniable cinematic achievements.

``The Blair Witch Project'' took form one night when Myrick and Sanchez tossed around candidates for the title of ``all-time scariest movie.'' The usual suspects were rounded up - ``The Exorcist,'' ``The Omen,'' ``The Shining,'' ``The Haunting.''

But then the two first-time directors, who met as film students at the University of Central Florida, hit on a television program that scared them even more as kids - the 1970s syndicated series, ``In Search Of . . .'' The popular show, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, explored unexplained mysteries like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, haunted houses and UFOs.

``All that jerky, grainy footage they used gave you the feeling that you were seeing something that was real,'' says Sanchez, 30, who grew up in Washington state and lived in perpetual fear that Bigfoot might jump out of the closet some night.

``We thought, `Wouldn't it be great if we could make a horror movie that would seem totally realistic to people.' ''

Sanchez and Myrick began to sketch out the legend of the Blair Witch, drawing upon folklore surrounding the Salem witch trials and ghost stories they heard as children.

Soon they had a 200-year back story that traced its fabricated origins to 1785 when several children in the Maryland township of Blair accused Elly Kedward of luring them into her home to draw blood from them. Kedward was found guilty of witchcraft and banished from the village in the dead of winter. A year later, all of her accusers, along with half the town's children, vanished.

The intricately plotted mythology continues to present day when the three student filmmakers - headstrong Heather Donahue, camera man Joshua Leonard and sound engineer Michael Williams - disappeared after five days in the Black Hills Forest. ``The Blair Witch Project'' follows the filmmakers during that time, including 16mm footage shot for the documentary as well as shaky, behind-the-scenes, High-8 video recordings Heather made of their growing frustrations and terror.

If the film isn't enough to satisfy moviegoers, the ``Blair Witch'' Web site (www.blairwitch.com) tracks the aftermath - the police investigation, interviews with detectives and relatives, and photos of the film canisters found buried in the forest. The Web site's tremendous popularity has given the movie much of its pre-release buzz.

``The movie was always intended to be but a small piece of the puzzle,'' Myrick, 35, says. ``It's like one episode of an anthology.''

In fact, the filmmakers' original idea for the movie more closely resembled the one-hour special airing throughout the month on the Sci-Fi Channel. Titled ``Curse of the Blair Witch,'' the pseudo-documentary traces the legend's history and the string of horrors that have plagued the surrounding area for more than 200 years.

Myrick and Sanchez scrapped that approach after they sent their three young actors into the woods of Maryland's Seneca Creek State Park for eight days. They gave them a crash course in filmmaking, handed them 16mm and High-8 cameras and told them to record everything they did. Each day, the actors moved around from point to point, guided by a hand-held global positioning system and notes left by the directors.

``We had a 35-page script that had basically no dialogue,'' Sanchez says. ``The main plot point was that they were looking for the witch and then bad things happened.''

``It didn't take us long to realize that the movie was in the footage they were shooting,'' Myrick says. ``All the third-party stuff was getting in the way. Plus, they were doing such an awesome job improvising. We just turned them loose.''

The filmmakers, along with producer Hale and assorted other crew members, staged nightly raids on the actors, rushing their tent and making scary noises in the night. As the shoot wore on, the actors saw their food rations cut and the nightly incursions increased. By the time the eight-day ordeal was over, they were a broken lot.

``We wanted them to be as real as possible,'' Sanchez says. ``Even though they knew it was just a movie, we had them pretty scared. The forest can be a pretty spooky place at night.''

And spooky is precisely the kind of mood the ``Blair Witch'' gang wanted.

`` `Scream' and all its clones supposedly marked the return of the horror film, but those movies really don't scare you,'' Hale says. ``They make you jump, but they're really parodies, saturated with this wink-wink, nudge-nudge mentality. We wanted to give people a really bad fright - `bad' being good in this case.''

Adds Myrick: ``The focus in recent horror movies has been the monster. And in the rush to create a cooler monster, the horror gets lost in the process. We just got back to the essence of what scared us.''

When Artisan Entertainment purchased ``The Blair Witch Project'' at Sundance for $1.1 million, Sanchez and Myrick celebrated - and then paid off their credit cards. The film was shot for around $20,000 (``somewhere between the cost of a Ford Taurus and a Jeep Cherokee,'' Myrick says). Things were so tight in post-production that Hale was forced to return the RCA High-8 video camera he had purchased for $500 at Circuit City so he could pay other bills.

``We had beaten the hell out of that camera, done everything to it but drop it in the creek,'' Hale says. ``Luckily for us, they honored their no-questions-asked return policy.''

The recognition and acclaim - ``Blair Witch'' won the Youth Prize at Cannes - has been satisfying for the co-directing team, who have held, between them, jobs as a truck driver, bartender, wedding video maker, set decorator and Web page designer.

``At Cannes, I kept running into people who were wearing more than our movie cost,'' Myrick quips. ``Maybe now, we're over the hump and can make a few more movies.''

They already have financing for their next project, a comedy titled ``Heart of Love.''

``This time I think we'll have a budget equivalent to a fully loaded Grand Cherokee,'' Sanchez says.

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3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Something hip this way comes

Chilling `Blair Witch Project' could be the indie hit of the summer

(2) Heather O'Donahue, a member of a documentary-film crew stalking a local legend, turns the camera on herself i`n ``The Blair Witch Project.''

(3) Filmmakers Dan Myrick, left, and Eduardo Sanchez came up with the idea for their film while talking about the scariest movies they'd ever seen.