Cannibal Holocaust influenced The Blair Witch Project

Deodato's film invented the device Blair Witch turned into a genre: a film crew goes into a remote place, does not come back, and what the audience watches is presented as the footage recovered afterwards. Both films also ran the same trick on their audience, which is the part usually missed. Deodato had to produce his supposedly dead actors in court to prove he had not killed them; Blair Witch's campaign listed its cast as missing and seeded a fabricated mythology online before release. In both cases the claim that the footage is real is not a framing device, it is the product.