‘Longlegs’: How a creepy viral marketing campaign brought Nicolas Cage’s new horror movie to life [Video]

In the spring of 1999, word started to spread among college campuses in America about some missing students. 

Leaflets were handed out, stories were planted in newspapers and rumours peppered through chat forums.

An official website was updated with theories, images of the students and mythology about what they had last set out to document: a haunting local legend known as the Blair Witch. 

None of this was real, of course. It was an extremely clever marketing campaign for the found footage movie The Blair Witch Project, famously made on a shoestring budget of $60,000 (€55,429) and garnering $248.6 million (€229.6m) in return. 

This innovative early use of the internet to create a viral campaign of intrigue, blurring the lines between fiction and reality, changed how movies were marketed forever. 

While there …