‘The Blair Witch Project’ 24th Anniversary – ‘Taco’ Was the ‘Safe Word’ on Set

Groundbreaking horror mockumentary The Blair Witch Project blurred the lines between fiction and reality as a group of unknown filmmakers created a movie that required a safe word.

University of Central Florida student filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez designed a story outline for the movie and allowed the actors to essentially “become” the characters. That led actors Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard to remain in strict character throughout the eight days of filming – which required a safe word and a very large knife.

Why did ‘The Blair Witch Project’ cast needed a safe word?

The filmmaking duo wrote a 35-page outline instead of an actual script, which may have been why Miramax passed on their pitch. Eventually, Artisan Entertainment moved forward with the project and they began to cast for the film.

Because filmmakers wanted to go full throttle into improv, the cast remained in character for the entire shoot. Since this could get rather intense, they created a “safe” word in the event a character break was needed.

“We needed code words to break from being an actor to being who we actually are,” actor Michael Williams shared with The Week. “If you said ‘taco,’ the other two actors had to repeat the word ‘taco,’ so I knew, and they knew, we were all out of character at the same time.”

The cast starved and Heather Donohue brought a knife

Heather Donahue, who played the overzealous student filmmaker, was a little wary of heading into the woods with a bunch of guys. “My mom was like, ‘Please get their social security numbers. We really don’t want you to do this,’ she explained. “Nobody wanted me to do this,” she told Paper Magazine.

“I brought a giant knife because everybody who loved me was telling me, ‘You should not do this. This sounds like a snuff film. Why are you going into the woods with a bunch of guys you don’t know?’” she added.

Also worrisome was how this shoot broke just about every Screen Actors Guild (SAG) rule. Myrick really wanted the cast vulnerable and scared, which sparked this “kind of total-immersion scenario to the actors,” he revealed to Rolling Stone.

“If we’ve physically and mentally abused them enough in the process of getting them up to those intense moments at the end, then they’d be able to tap into emotional places that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to tap into,” he admitted. “We did keep them isolated, we harassed them at night, we deprived them of sleep, we made them move a lot during the day. Then at the end, we slowly fed them less and less, and they never knew what was happening. They were always off-balance.”

Essentially the actors were armed with a Power Bar and a banana to sustain them for each day of shooting.

So 24 years later, could filmmakers do what they did in 1999 on a 2023 set? Probably not.