Chapter 22:
This was the seventh day of the shooting, but they were already very close to the end of the script, and if everything went well, they were practically going to wrap up the shooting before even a whole week passed.
Will stared at papers on the table and a walkie talkie in his hand while sitting on the couch of a cottage they had rented a few miles away from the town. There were always about ten to fifteen crew members and actors at the cottage, and because the space was limited, they had to sleep on either the couch or on the floor.
For Jeffery’s crew, this was one of the most intense filming sessions they had ever done, especially since the whole filming was going non-stop 24/7.
As for the three main leads, they were mainly in the tents and had the walkie-talkie with them, through which Will was constantly in contact with them. The main reason why Will brought the walkie-talkies was to prevent them from getting lost in the woods.
But still, Zach, who was playing Mike, managed to get lost more than once in the three days of shooting itself.
He was terrible with his sense of direction.
Over the course of the last seven days, as the shooting went on, Will wanted to get as raw reactions as possible from the three main leads, and that was why he was trying a few low-blow tricks, but just in case, he had already given the three actors a subtle warning.
However, before that, Will had made a slight change in the contracts. This was the most important clause for the contract, and for some reason, his mind had been too preoccupied with other things that it had slipped his mind.
“This contract will allow me to add some external factors and improvise the plot on the spot, without informing you, and this is done to get a raw expression of yours. A few things might happen which may mess with your mind, but if you think it’s too much, just come to me. Also, I will provide a psychological doctor’s appointment for you three, with the first two visits paid from my own pocket.”
The three of them had agreed to this, not taking Will’s words seriously.
In his previous life, [The Blair Witch Project] was an instant success and raised the bar for horror genre movies.
People regard it as one of the must-watch movies before dying.
The movie was such a hit that even two decades later, many people believed it to be real, and when it was released, some conspiracy theorists had even started a man-hunt for the three main leads of the movie.
But in all this success, what the audience and viewers didn’t know of, was the real-life effect it had on the lives of the actors who were part of the movie.
All actors had used their real names in this movie, under the instructions of the director, to make everything as realistic as possible for the audience.
And it had worked in terms of bringing money, but in the case of the real lives of actors, this movie made things even worse.
The main lead, Heather, had to quit acting because she couldn’t find another job because many believed that she was actually a ghost because, in their minds, the movie was real footage.
In fact, her mother received letters of condolences and sympathy cards from the audience because many assumed it to be real footage and thought that her daughter was either dead or missing.
The thing was, the production team had also made the actors sign a similar contract with the actors, which allowed them to “mess with their heads.” The only difference was that Will would not push the actors to their limits and exploit them with this new clause.
While the word ‘exploit’ may sound a bit absurd for the first clause, and even for the actors, who were unknown people at that time, it didn’t sound like a big deal.
However, what they did not expect was how the previous world’s production team “messed with their minds.”
While most of their techniques were alright, some of them were quite right, exploiting and taking advantage of the contract.
The most infamous of them was when one night, the actors were sleeping in their tents, and the production team quietly began to shake their tent.
This mind sounded like nothing, but the problem was the actors were not aware of this, and neither were they warned about it, and because they had already signed the contract, they couldn’t even speak anything against it because of the strictness of the production team.
Will chose not to make any contract and used a less subtle way of creating in-depth horror.
Instead of keeping the actors fully in the dark, Will told them a bit about the plot and then he would make it so that there’s something unexpected happening, which in turn would generate confusion, and that was how he would get a lot raw expression from the actors.
“There will always be one scene which I will change on the spot, and that scene won’t be revealed to you.”
For example, he just told them that they would hear a kid’s laughter, but what they didn’t expect was the laughter from not one but tens of kids, overlapping with each other. This laughter came from a pre-recorded clip that Will had himself recorded from a nearby town’s kindergarten.
Another thing Will did was replace the sound of crackling wood to someone running through the forest. This one had a much better effect.
But there is one thing worth mentioning. Out of all the inhumane techniques which the previous world’s production team used, Will chose to take the two most… crippling ones.
As per the script, as the plot progressed, the three actors began to have discord among them, which was very important in the movie’s success because their anger and frustrated expressions were very genuine.
However, those emotions were not fake; instead, they were real.
The production team gave the actors less and less food as the days went by, and Will followed this one.
And the second one which he chose to do was the ending of the movie.
The ending was set in a basement.
Will did not tell Heather and Mike about what to expect in the basement of the house at the end. He instructed Mike to run up and down the stairs while also yelling for Josh before running to the basement, and to keep Heather as far behind him as possible.
When Mike reached the basement, two production assistants dressed in black grabbed him and told him to stand in the corner.
When Heather arrived, they also grabbed her and gently placed her 16mm on the floor while gesturing to her stop screaming.
And then in the camera recording, on the floor of the basement, a shadow was seen, coming from behind the camera screen, but as Heather’s cries faded, the shooting came to an end.
But for June, who was acting as Heather, this scene was too unexpected and adding on the ‘unexpected improvisations’ by Will; she was so scared that she had to be calmed down by him.
In fact, Will had even called in a psychiatrist before the ending shoot began – this was his final measure, if the situation went out of hand.