Burkittsville, a village of less than 200 in Western Maryland, became the subject of national attention in 1999. A rumor had percolated that three filmmakers were last seen there before inexplicably disappearing into a nearby forest while they investigated the legend of the “Blair Witch.”

A Netscape-era website that saw millions of visitors per day teased that a production company was making a documentary using footage discovered in the forest where they disappeared.

That “documentary,” titled “The Blair Witch Project,” was so wildly successful that it birthed a new horror subgenre. With that, the Maryland-coded imagery of a sleepy village, the woods and the mysticism of a fabled witch became iconic symbols of the found-footage subgenre.

Found-footage horror films exploded in popularity afterward, according to a Banner analysis of over 4,000 horror movies. While documentary-style horror existed before, “The Blair Witch Project” led to the labeling of “found footage” films.

“Something that we had written had been made into a whole subgenre of film,” said Eduardo Sánchez, who directed, wrote and edited “The Blair Witch Project” with Daniel Myrick.

The movie had a budget of $60,000 and was created by Sánchez and Myrick when they were in their late 20s. Today’s blockbuster horror movies often cost tens of millions of dollars to make.

That low budget meant the film had no professional lighting, no costumes and no soundtrack. It instead tells its story through the amateur lens of three young filmmakers who are figuring the film out as they go.

Sánchez was practically living that life. He, too, was young and hungry for success in the filmmaking business. “The Blair Witch Project” was his last attempt at that before he would be forced to pivot careers, he said, and he had no idea if something so experimental would work.

“The story of the filmmakers was very much our story, and how we were making the movie was very much the way that they were making their movie,” Sánchez said. “It was very immersive.”

The shaky footage, naivete and unpredictability that fed off of Sánchez’s own experiences made “The Blair Witch Project” feel unsettlingly real and would define the found-footage subgenre.

It grossed $250 million worldwide, making it one of the most profitable independent films of all time.

Maryland filmmakers took note.

Of the 60 horror movies set in Maryland, 10 are found-footage films, a trend started by “The Blair Witch Project.”

That’s the third highest number of found-footage films set in any state, trailing only California and New York, where thousands of horror movies are set.

Found footage seems like a surefire way to success for these filmmakers. Of the 10 found-footage films set in Maryland, seven have among the highest IMDb rankings of horror movies set in Maryland.

“The Blair Witch Project” also revived two other subgenres: backwoods horror and isolation horror.

The film largely unfolds in the fictional Black Hills Forest, which is actually vast leafy Seneca Creek State Park in Gaithersburg, near where Sánchez grew up.

“It’s great during the day, and then as the sun goes down, everybody goes to sleep, you start hearing things,” Sánchez said. “Your imagination goes crazy.”

The entity terrorizing the protagonists is an apparent witch that has haunted the forest since the late 1700s, when she was persecuted. The plot feels distinct to Maryland’s colonial legacy of women being persecuted for “witchcraft.”

“It feels like the movie could have been in many different places, but it seems now, looking back like this, Maryland was the perfect place for it,” Sánchez said.

The Banner used OpenAI’s large language model GPT 4.1 to classify key characteristics of over 4,000 horror films, such as subgenre, setting and characteristics of the protagonist. The Banner chose GPT 4.1 after testing it against other OpenAI, Anthropic and Google models and verifying that results from GPT 4.1 were 100% accurate during testing.

This process was conducted on an initial database that contained the title of the horror movie, the year of its release, its IMDb description and the state that it was set in. That database was sourced from a Reddit user who compiled a list of horror movies using classifications from IMDb and Letterboxd to determine if the movie belonged in the horror genre. They then studied the movie to determine where it was set, using explicit clues, such as direct quotes, and subtler clues, such as license plates.