INTO THE WOODS

Daniel Myrick (director, writer, editor): Ed [Sánchez] and I met in the University of Central Florida (UCF) film programme, in Orlando. In our senior year, we talked about how we were disillusioned with horror films of the day, which were becoming more self-referential and campy. We missed the feeling we had when we saw films like The Shining and The Exorcist. We wanted to come up with something genuinely scary.

Eduardo Sánchez (director, writer, editor):

“It’s not quite reality.”
In which a bunch of film-school graduates hatch a plan to take horror back to its properly scary roots.

We had this idea of a documentary crew that goes into the woods and disappears. But the initial idea was that it’s 20, 25 years later that the footage gets found.

Michael Monello (co-producer): I was in the same film programme as Ed and Dan, with [producers] Gregg Hale and Robin Cowie, and [production designer] Ben Rock. I remember Ed telling me about the idea of making a movie about this footage shot in the ’70s, and telling the story in a similar fashion to the Leonard Nimoy TV series In Search Of… — saying it could be real.

Myrick: Originally it was going to be a cult in the woods, but Ed lived in Maryland and we decided that would be a good place to shoot. That general area is rife with folklore — going back to the 1600s, you’ve got the Salem Witch Trials — so thematically a witch worked really well.

Sánchez: But we realised very quickly that shooting a period film set in the ’70s would be very difficult at our budget level. So we put it on the back burner.

Myrick: After we graduated in ’93, Ed went back to Maryland and I stayed in Orlando, working as an editor. We were hit full-frontal with the reality of needing to do work.

By 1996, I