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Blair Witch Project co-creator returns with documentary-style UFO movie
Some 20 years after turning the fake documentary/found footage style of filmmaking into a cultural phenomenon with The Blair Witch Project, that film's co-writer and director, Daniel Myrick, is returning to the format with his new movie, Skyman.
The movie recounts the story of Carl Merryweather, a man who believes he was visited by an alien being at the age of 10 while out camping in the desert with his father. Now, 30 years later, he is convinced that he is being summoned back to the same location for an otherworldly reunion — which he intends to document.
Myrick premiered a teaser trailer for the movie on Monday night (Jan. 28) at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah (sort of the more experimental, lo-fi cousin to the town's bigger Sundance Festival), with a full trailer coming later in the year. The teaser is now online:
Myrick said on the film's Facebook page that Skyman is "a sci-fi/docu-drama that has been a labor of love for quite some time, inspired by a fascination with UFO subculture."
Although The Blair Witch Project became a massive success and pop culture touchstone in 1999 — not to mention a vast influence on a generation of faux-documentary films and filmmakers — Myrick and his Blair Witch co-creator, Eduardo Sanchez, strangely never directed another picture together again (they were executive producers on the 2000 and 2016 sequels).
Both have remained in the independent film sphere, continuing to work separately on more traditional narrative genre movies. Sanchez's efforts include the creepy Seventh Moon (2008), Lovely Molly (2011), and Exists (2014), while Myrick's last theatrical feature, the ambitious Middle East horror thriller The Objective, came out in 2009. He also directed the TV movie Under the Bed in 2017.
Whether Myrick can recapture the realistically eerie tone that he and Sanchez turned into a still-resonant horror landmark 20 years ago remains to be seen. Skyman is slated to come out sometime later this year.
(via Bloody Disgusting)
