It’s been 27 years since The Blair Witch Project premiered in theaters, and now the team behind the found-footage blockbuster is back with a new movie that’s a modern twist on documentary-style horror.
In The Influencer Project, real-life influencer Chiara King travels to Copenhagen to give her followers an inside look at the “glamorous business of online fame.” But as documentary cameras start filming her every move, a menacing stalker begins closing in and the fictional documentary turns into something that blurs the line between “content and evidence, follower and predator, fact and fiction.”
I sat down for an exclusive interview with producers Gregg Hale and Eduardo Sanchez, who also worked on the original Blair Witch Project (Hale as a producer, Sanchez as a director), to talk about what The Influencer Project owes to Blair Witch and what they can reveal about next year’s Blair Witch Project reboot.
As you can see in the exclusive clip above, cameras are everywhere in The Influencer Project. Chiara is filmed constantly both by herself and the always-present documentary crew, striving to hit 10 million social media followers. I asked Hale and Sanchez if that new format will carry over to the new Blair Witch Project film, which is set to release in 2027.
“If you’re setting a found-footage movie in this era, then that’s the language that we’re living with: social media influencers, vertical video, surveillance cameras, cop body cams,” Sanchez says. “So we don’t want to say too much about the new Blair Witch movie. But yeah, I mean eventually if you’re making it in this era, you have to play with the toys that are available.”
“But I also think the answer for us as ongoing day-to-day creators, and [in] interacting with Dylan Clark, who’s directing the new [Blair Witch], is we don’t think about stories in that way,” Hale adds. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, what is the language of found footage and how are we going to use that to tell this story?’ It always starts with what is the story and when is the story set and what are the characters doing and how does that affect how it would be seen?”
“It’s all based on the time period, you know what I mean?” Sanchez says. “So you got to use the tools that are available to you, and so that’s the bottom line.”
Sanchez says that, given today’s always-online culture, the pervasiveness of cameras in The Influencer Project was easier to explain narratively than in The Blair Witch Project.
“Blair Witch took place in 1994,” Sanchez says. “Heather [Donahue, who starred in that film], had a 16mm film camera because that’s what you shot documentaries on back then. And then a Hi8 video camera was just [for] behind the scenes, a cheap [way to] shoot stuff. And we just told them to just shoot everything. It’s like, ‘God, there’s many reasons why she’s continuing to shoot this movie [that had] nothing to do with documenting the Blair Witch mythology.’ And so you cut to nowadays, you don’t have to worry about that at all. There are cameras everywhere. It’s easier to tell the story.”
In The Influencer Project, we watch as Chiara is stalked by an unknown figure and are fed a constant stream of her millions of followers reacting to her increasingly dire situation. While the central horror of The Blair Witch Project hinged on a literal monster in the dark, The Influencer Project is focused on more grounded terror, examining the nightmares that can come with living your life online, and the audience’s reaction to it.
“There’s always somebody lying in wait ready to either interact with you in a good way or interact with you in a terrible way,” Hale says. “And all that stuff comes directly from Chiara’s experiences as a real influencer where every disgusting, despicable thing that is said in that movie has been said to her. The spiritual connection between The Blair Witch Project and this is in The Blair Witch Project, they chose to go into the woods and there was bad shit in the woods. But now you don’t even have to make the choice to enter that wilderness. We’re living in that internet wilderness all the time.”
The Influencer Project is in theaters now.
Michael is Global Head of Partnerships at IGNE, where he leads all 3rd party partnerships across games and entertainment studios, including for tentpole events lilke IGN Live, San Diego Comic Con, gamescom, and IGN Fan Fest. He’s spent 20 years working in the games and entertainment industry, and his adventures have taken him everywhere from the Oscars to Japan to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Follow him on Bluesky @MichaelPeyton
