The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 American found footage supernatural horror film written, edited, and directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. The found footage work is a pseudo-documentary in which three young students (Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard) hike into the Appalachian Mountains near Burkittsville, Maryland, to shoot a documentary about a local myth known as the Blair Witch. Myrick and Sánchez conceived of a fictional legend of the Blair Witch in 1993. They developed a 35-page screenplay with the dialogue to be improvised.