Multiplatform story worlds and transmedia storytelling have helped franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars dominate the entertainment industry. The strategy of getting their audiences invested in a massive narrative told through movies, television shows, comic books, video games, and other media, has allowed for the Walt Disney Company to earn 94.9 subscribers largely thanks to two programs, The Mandalorian and WandaVision. Likewise, the MCU shared universe has enjoyed a worldwide box office revenue of 22.56 billion U.S. dollars from its films alone.
Of course, in order to earn such massive profits, the studios had to put up a substantial investment—the production budget for an average MCU movie is $190,350,000, and Disney+ invested between $1.5 to 1.75 billion in its content in 2020. While this seems like a lot, it should be emphasized that Disney spent relatively little on its programming budget compared to businesses like Netflix that spent $16 billion on original content in 2020. This indicates that transmedia success does not rely on big budgets but the skillful use of transmedia projects that connect well with audiences.
Indeed, one of the greatest (and earliest) examples of transmedia storytelling came not from a major movie studio but a group of independent filmmakers promoting a low-budget film that became one of the biggest media phenomena of its time —The Blair Witch Project (1999). Through their creative use of multiplatform narrative, this $60,000 indie project went on to earn nearly $250 million worldwide, making it one of the most successful independent films in history.
The success of indie transmedia projects like The Blair Witch Project aren’t isolated incidents either. In 2018, Blair Witch filmmaker Michael Monello and producer Nick Braccia created a new low-budget transmedia story world in Video Palace, a “media horror” saga told through scripted podcasts and prose stories. Its success reveals that, thanks to the variety of storytelling platforms available today, producing transmedia projects on a budget is not only possible but an ideal way for storytellers to build their audiences and test the viability of their stories.
I spoke with both Monello and Braccia, who shared their thoughts on The Blair Witch franchise and how independent creators can leverage transmedia techniques. Their insights reveal that a keen understanding of audience sensibilities, and not big budgets, is the actual deciding factor in developing profitable media franchises.
How The Blair Witch Project Launched a Transmedia Viral Phenomenon
The Blair Witch Project was conceived in 1993 when indie filmmakers Michael Monello, Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez, and others developed the mythology of the Blair Witch, a Maryland woman found guilty of witchcraft in the late 1700s who reappeared throughout the centuries to murder multiple victims. Their fictional legend evolved into a 35-page screenplay which became the basis for a “found footage” movie (one of the very first) about three student filmmakers who hiked into the Black Hills to interview residents about the Blair Witch, only to become her next victims.
To create the story’s documentary style, the filmmakers shot the movie on home video cameras and relied on improvised dialogue from the actors. This enhanced the film’s gritty, realistic tone, and when clips of the unfinished movie wound up on television, the positive response inspired the storytellers to take their project in an unexpected direction.
“We found ourselves in the unique position of having people interested in our work before it was done,” recalls Monello, who now works as the creative director of his own transmedia ad agency Campfire. “And so, it became – how do we keep them entertained so they don’t lose interest? For us it was about exploring the story with fans while we were still editing the film.”
This led the filmmakers to create The Blair Witch website, a proto-transmedia extension of the film that delved into and expanded on the mythology in ways the film did not. Visitors to the site found a detailed timeline of the Blair Witch’s alleged activities over the last two hundred years. They could view taped interviews of family members who discussed the “disappearance” of the film’s main characters. And they could even watch news clips of anchormen reporting on the search for the missing filmmakers.
The result was a narrative more gripping than the movie on its own. Since the website was presented not as a marketing device but a “real” record of the Blair Witch legend, it became a new platform for audiences to experience this story world. Some visitors weren’t sure if what they were seeing was real or fictional and began sharing the website with others while building their own fan sites. This created an immersive experience that encouraged audience participation while building anticipation for the movie – which was now seen as just part of the greater Blair Witch story.
“People think what excited the audience was the mythology,” Monello states. “And I think that was a big part of it. But I think what really excited and energized the fan community was the fact that they were a part of building and creating the mythology and spreading it. And so, they owned it.”
While Monello emphasizes the transmedia aspect of The Blair Witch Project evolved organically, the enthusiastic response to the website shows the power of transmedia storytelling lies in audience connection, not big budget marketing. In fact, according to Jeff Gomez, CEO of transmedia production company Starlight Runner Entertainment, The Blair Witch Project stands as one of the greatest transmedia marketing case studies.
“By spreading the word about this site, you were getting a charge out of letting someone else in on a weird secret,” states Gomez in his 2007 post The Internet Explosion. “You were validated and celebrated for your participation in the Blair Witch happening, right there, on the fly, in real time. You and your friends could connect, theorize, and explore this world to the point where the movie became far more than a self-contained piece of entertainment. It was simply a component in a greater experience, and that made it magical.”
Today, Gomez’s studio helps major companies like Coca-Cola and Sony Pictures develop transmedia story worlds through movies, comic books, television series, video games, and other media. However, he’s never lost sight of the way modern digital technology allows storytellers of all backgrounds to create affordable forms of transmedia entertainment that reach massive audiences.
“In 1999, the Internet was still mysterious and compelling. There wasn’t a sense that so much on it can be fake news. The Blair Witch visionaries, in a very Orson Welles War of the Worlds kind of way, hijacked media platforms of their day to position a fictional story as real,” notes Gomez, referencing a 1938 radio drama where multiple actors, including legendary filmmaker Orson Welles, narrated a series of fake news bulletins about an alien invasion based on H.G. Welles’ science fiction novel War of the Worlds. The broadcasts allegedly caused panic in some listeners who believed what they were hearing was real.
Likewise, Gomez finds the Blair Witch Project filmmakers tapped into similar techniques to create their own phenomena. After film studio Artisan Entertainment bought the distribution rights for The Blair Witch Project, they continued building on the transmedia marketing campaign by producing a realistic mockumentary, Curse of the Blair Witch, which aired on the Sci-Fi Channel, continued to play up the “real” legend of the Blair Witch, and massively amplified audience awareness. The Blair Witch Project: A Dossier was published by Onyx books soon after, offering an additional way to experience the story through faux newspaper clippings, police notes, and journal extracts, and a series of comics called The Blair Witch Chronicles was published by Oni Press, further delving into the history of the cursed forests of Burkittsville, Maryland, where the film took place.
Much like Welles’ broadcast, the Blair Witch website, film, mockumentary, comics, and books used multiple media platforms to tap into audience fears about the supernatural and unknown, enhancing the story’s appeal (although once the movie was released, most people likely knew it was fictional). But where Welles’ radio broadcast was an isolated event that did not allow for much audience interaction, the Internet now allows audiences to become active participants in these story worlds by immediately interacting with the filmmakers and other fans online. This, Gomez emphasizes, is what transmedia storytelling is really about—and why transmedia marketing is such a powerful technique.
The Expanding Blair Witch Transmedia Story World
The original filmmakers helped craft the first Blair Witch transmedia campaign with a focus on how their audience resonated with their mythology. Once the movie became a hit, however, the Blair Witch franchise was taken over by new moviemakers who had their own ideas for how the story should evolve. This, Monello feels, caused the story world to evolve in ways that weren’t consistent with the original mythology, resulting in a less effective transmedia story.
“When the second movie [Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows (2000)] came out, that was clearly a version of Blair Witch as that filmmaker perceived it – as an outsider, as someone who wasn’t involved in any of this,” he states. “They lost sight of what the story was because they were only looking at the movie. And there’s all this other stuff around it, and a lot of it was audience participation. And none of the other films had audience participation in any form.”
While the Blair Witch franchise continued offering new stories through other transmedia storytelling platforms such as young adult novels and video games, Monello feels the franchise as a whole lost sight of the storyline the original filmmakers developed and the fans felt they owned in favor of new stories that were only tangentially related to the Blair Witch legend.
Monello’s observations reflect an issue with other transmedia projects such as the DC Extended Universe. Where other shared movie universes such as the MCU rely on a producer like Kevin Feige to conduct the overall direction of their transmedia properties, creating consistency throughout the movie and TV series plotlines, the DCEU divides control of its franchise among multiple creative visionaries. The result is an assortment of work that can offer cinematic masterpieces like Todd Philips’ Joker, but do not offer any real consistency among the divergent storylines.
The numbers back Monello up. While the Blair Witch sequels all made money, they don’t come close to the success of the original. Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows grossed $47.7 million against a $15 million dollar budget. Likewise, the 2016 follow up Blair Witch grossed just over $45 million against a $5 million dollar budget. Audience response was generally unfavorable, with Book of Shadows gaining only an 18% approval score from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics citing a formulaic plot as opposed to the innovative participatory route taken in the original movie.
“More modest or independent franchises like Blair Witch are driven by hardcore fan bases,” said Gomez. “They’ve fallen in love with the minutia and the cosmology of the story world, inclusive of the transmedia extensions. As a filmmaker, if you don’t observe this lore, this canonicity, then you are disrespecting it. If the filmmakers don’t care, why should the fans? Even if the films are profitable, the appetite for anything more is diminished. It’s all downhill from there.”
Given the direction The Blair Witch Project went, what lessons can indie creators learn from this early transmedia case study on how to approach modern independent storytelling? Monello and Braccia both offer insights based on their most recent transmedia story, the horror podcast Video Palace.
Video Palace: New Transmedia Entry Points
Born out of a concept pitch to AMC Networks’ horror streaming service Shudder, Video Palace is a ten-part scripted podcast about a young couple’s investigation of the mysterious “white tapes,” vintage video cassettes linked to a series of disasters and the otherworldly figure known only as “The Eyeless Man.” Funded by Shudder, the project used professional SAG actors, making it, in Monello’s words, “a hybrid between an indie podcast and a studio production.”
The end result earned an enthusiastic fan base that promotes the story through online reviews and discussion threads on social network sites like Reddit. Reviewers regularly ask for a second season (which may happen) and Monello indicates there’s also interest in making a Video Palace film.
“Every day new people are coming into podcasts, which is really interesting because, unlike a film where everyone pretty much knows about it, it seems like people are discovering Video Palace for the first time because they didn’t get into podcasts until one really grabbed them in and they go exploring,” observes Monello. “So, even though we made the podcast almost two years ago, it still feels new, because there are new people finding it and talking about it much later. So, it’s a little bit more evergreen.”
The podcast’s success confirms what Monello stresses to independent storytellers – that investing in a potentially expensive feature film is not always a direction that creators need to take to build an audience these days. Sometimes, a less expensive set of launch platforms for your transmedia property offer a better entryway into your mythology.
“Dollars to dollars, the production of the Video Palace podcast was less than what it cost to get Blair Witch from an idea to premiering at Sundance,” he states. “To create a franchise, I never felt like you had to have a movie. The podcast is almost like a test – if an audience takes to it, we can expand on it. And if they don’t, well, we still made something we’re proud of.”
In the case of Video Palace, the positive response convinced the creators to building their story world – this time with a short horror story collection, Video Palace: In Search of the Eyeless Man. Released in October 2020, the book earned positive reviews and helps expand on the mythology by incorporating the creative visions of other horror storytellers. Although set in the same world as the original Video Palace podcast, the new stories deepen the story world by offering tales that explore the universe from a nostalgic or feminist viewpoint, allowing their shared universe to become more inclusive.
“We gave these established horror authors more information about the mythology of the Eyeless Man than we revealed publicly,” Monello shares, noting both he and Braccia intentionally gave the writers the freedom to develop their own stories within the constraints of their mythology. “Because we needed these stories to be consistent when we do reveal things and people can understand how everything fits together. So, now what you have are people who read the book and go, ‘Oh, now I want to listen to the podcast!’ And people who listen to the podcast who say, ‘Oh, I want more so I’ll look at the book.’ And they feed off each other.”
This symbiotic relationship re-emphasizes that modern transmedia projects can be built from low-budget platforms like books, comics, podcasts, and social media. This also gives you the power to guide your transmedia story world in the direction you want it to evolve in as new transmedia opportunities come up – particularly if you do eventually get the chance to turn your story into a film.
“I’d like to think the stories that we tell would augment the stories in the book and in the podcast, but not necessarily replicate any of them. In a film, I’d want to start from the perspective of, what’s the best story that will appeal the most in a film format?” Monello states. “We have some great stories that I think would make amazing movies – one is set in the 1950s and 1960s that’s not necessarily an origin story but gets to an early experience of the Eyeless Man. And we have another story that takes place in the 1980s.
“But when I think about film, I think you have to deliver something that makes sense for someone who hasn’t listened to the podcast or read the book,” he adds. “It’s got to be interesting on its own. The genre of Video Palace is media horror which gives us the freedom to play in any form of media. I think we all had ideas of how a transmedia franchise should be developed and this was our chance, devoid of clients and people telling us what to do to put our theories in action.”
How Modern Indie Storytellers Can Approach Multimedia Franchises
Both The Blair Witch Project and Video Palace fall into the horror genre making them particularly effective stories to share through podcasts and independent films that are popular with horror fans. However, Monello stresses that independent transmedia producers with projects in other genres need to connect with audience sensibilities in order to communicate the story on the right platforms and in the most effective ways.
“Look at where your audience is and how they like to consume media,” he states. “For us, podcasting made sense because we wanted it to be in the horror genre. If your transmedia story franchise is in the fantasy genre, a tabletop game might be a great place to start because a lot of tabletop gamers are fantasy fans, so that’s where your initial core audience is. And you can put something out there and see if they’re taking to this story world well – do they want more games in that world, do people start writing their own stories in that world? Look for the signs – are we building a fan community?”
Monello’s partner Nick Braccia notes that audio platforms like podcasts offer excellent low-cost ways to start building transmedia stories, similar to how self-published comic books and graphic novels helped earlier creators build their audience. He also feels that prose work, particularly micro fiction, can help build an audience – provided a creator knows where to share such material.
“So much of it for a young creator is calling your shot in respect to timing. And I guarantee this is going to happen – whether it’s an improv group or a live theater or whatever, whoever is thoughtful and subversive and creative enough to do fiction on Clubhouse is going to make major waves,” he states, referring to the increasingly popular audio-chat iPhone app that lets users have conversations on diverse topics in virtual rooms.
Ultimately, both Monello and Braccia emphasize that the key to developing a successful transmedia franchise, particularly for independent creators, is to let it develop organically.
“There are no people out there looking to buy a transmedia universe,” cautions Monello. “It’s very possible that when you put out that first piece of media for your transmedia universe that it’s the last piece of media for your transmedia universe. And that’s why you can’t have your mind on eighteen different pieces of media and where you’re going in the future. You have to focus on one piece and make sure it works as an individual story by itself.”
Likewise, remaining open-minded and flexible about your audience, where they prefer to receive their stories, and what types of stories they want to consume, is vital to the continued health of a transmedia universe.
“A successful transmedia narrative, by its nature, is participatory,” Monello states. “When you release your first transmedia property, you may suddenly find that a completely different group of people like it and get their stories from a place that wasn’t in your plan. But without the audience, there’s no value in the next extension unless they’re there and they’re asking for it.”
He cites a story from the Sundance premiere of The Blair Witch Project when he saw a long line of high school and college students who had become so immersed in the Blair Witch mythology, they had driven through a snow storm just to see if they could get standby tickets for a sold-out screening of the movie. Realizing how well their transmedia project had connected with such a prized demographic, he understood that they could negotiate a larger deal with the distributors – or make the money by simply screening the film themselves.
“One of the most powerful things about transmedia is your connection as a storyteller to your audience,” he says. “A script that’s just sitting in your drawer and being pitched to money people isn’t doing anything for you. But that story being put out into the world, even if it’s for free and costing you a bit of money, could potentially do something for you if you build a big enough audience. Now, you can walk into any room and pitch something that’s worth getting funded and take the next step. And that gives you power.”
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This is the fourth installment in a transmedia storytelling series being written in tandem with Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner Entertainment, one of the industry’s foremost transmedia producers. Starlight Runner consults with multiple companies from Disney to Sony to Coca-Cola to help establish their story worlds and produces transmedia content including graphic novels, videos, books, animated series, and web sites. Learn how your company can use them to produce your own full transmedia story world through narrative design, content production, licensing, merchandising, and fan cultivation.
The Transmedia Storytelling Series:
#1: How Disney+ Uses Star Wars to Dominate Digital Entertainment
#2: Ultraman: Translating a Multi-Billion Dollar Japanese Superhero Franchise for American Media
#3: Disney Marvel vs Warner Bros. DC: How Do Shared Universes Succeed or Fail?
Michael
Michael Jung is a freelance writer for hire with a keen interest in pop culture, education, nonprofit organizations, and unusual side hustles. His work has been featured in Screen Rant, ASU Now, and Free Arts. When not writing, you can find him entertaining kids as Spider-Man and encouraging them to embrace their inner superhero. Please contact him for his freelance writing services.