The Academy Museum Resurrects the Original ‘The Blair Witch Project’ Website for Its New Horror Show
Few horror movies have blurred the line between fiction and reality quite like ‘The Blair Witch Project’. Long before the film reached theaters, audiences were being told that three student filmmakers had vanished in the Maryland woods. For a while, plenty of people believed it.
Much of that illusion lived online. Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez launched the original website in June 1998 through their production site, presenting the Blair Witch as a real urban legend. It was packed with fake historical documents, accounts and news interviews about the missing students.
Now that once-lost piece of internet history is back. The Academy Museum has recreated the original promo website for ‘The Blair Witch Project’, featuring a 53-second clip of the site running on a vintage CRT monitor. The recreation is part of the museum’s new horror exhibition, and visitors will be able to surf it themselves.
The Academy Museum has recreated the original promo website for ‘THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT’. pic.twitter.com/KuD8aszhDK
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) September 24, 2026
The site is a centerpiece of the Ghosts chamber inside ‘The Horror Show’. That space is designed as a haunted living room where visitors can surf the original marketing website. It also features objects from ‘The Conjuring’, ‘The Monkey’, ‘Poltergeist’, ‘The Ring’ and ‘Talk to Me’.
The museum is pairing those pieces with historic Japanese woodblock prints and theatrical release posters from the 1960s and ’70s that speak to the resonance of ghost stories in Japanese culture. The original site has long since been taken down, so this is a rare chance to see it as it once appeared. It’s an inventive way to turn a piece of internet history into a walk-in experience.
The site was the backbone of a marketing campaign that marked a significant shift in strategy. Around the same time, the Sci-Fi channel aired a mockumentary, ‘Curse of the Blair Witch’, which depicted the legend as real and the students as truly missing. Filmmakers even distributed missing person flyers at screenings.
The numbers show how well it worked. By August 1999, the site had clocked 160 million hits, and Artisan reportedly spent around $25 million on the campaign. That’s a huge figure for a movie that had an original budget of $35,000 to $60,000, and a final cost of $200,000 to $750,000 after post-production and marketing.
The payoff was enormous. The film grossed $248.6 million, and it has been described as the fifth highest-earning independent film of all time. Its mix of found footage and internet-fueled mystery also helped revive the found-footage technique and influenced hits like ‘Paranormal Activity’, ‘Rec’ and ‘Cloverfield’.
‘The Horror Show’ opens on September 26 in the Academy Museum’s fourth-floor Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery and runs through July 25, 2027. It’s organized around 6 themed chambers: Gothic, Psychological, Science, Slasher, Religion and Ghosts. The only way out is through The Blood Room, a final immersive space with gallery walls layered in cinematic gore.
The exhibition features hundreds of original artifacts, costumes, props and production materials. Highlights include Bela Lugosi’s restored cape from ‘Dracula’, original ‘Psycho’ storyboards and costumes and props from ‘Alien’, ‘Get Out’, ‘Halloween’, ‘The Exorcist’ and ‘The Silence of the Lambs’. The advisory team includes Willem Dafoe, ‘Longlegs’ director Osgood Perkins and Oscar-winning makeup artist Howard Berger.
A packed slate of programming runs alongside it. It starts on September 26 with the retrospective ‘John Carpenter: Prince of Darkness’, followed by an all-ages Monster Mash on October 24 and a 21-plus Museum After Dark party on Halloween night. A 50th anniversary screening of ‘Carrie’ with Sissy Spacek in attendance is set for November 19.
The timing is fitting. A new version of ‘The Blair Witch Project’ is on the way, with a release date of September 2027, made by filmmaker Dylan Clark, who got his start on YouTube. Seeing the original website in a museum setting is a reminder of how groundbreaking the first campaign was.
It also shows how museums are treating internet culture as film history. A promo site that once fooled a nation now sits beside classic props and costumes, a fitting home for one of the most inventive horror marketing efforts ever.
Would you explore the recreated original ‘The Blair Witch Project’ website at the Academy Museum?
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