'Blair Witch' Director Eduardo Sanchez Goes Back to the Woods for 'Exists'

Adam Pockross
·Content Producer
Updated

Eduardo Sanchez can’t seem to get out of the woods.

As you can see in our exclusive Exists clip above, the co-writer and co-director of The Blair Witch Project returns to shadow-filled verdant terrain with the first Bigfoot movie in theaters since 1987’s Harry and the Hendersons. “Besides being a very inexpensive place to shoot, most of the horror stories that really intrigue me are based in very isolated locations, and the woods are one of them,” Sanchez explained to us over the phone. “And it’s a Bigfoot movie, so the whole idea is this creature’s trying to stay hidden, so it’s definitely going to be in a place where the visibility’s not good.”

Sanchez has been trying to make such a Sasquatch-ian film since soon after Blair Witch took over the world in 1999. “This is really the third Bigfoot film that I’ve tried to get going. The first was a huge $80 million movie that we almost sold. There was a lot of interest in it, but it was a period piece, very challenging as far as a genre movie. And then I co-wrote a smaller version [that] we didn’t have much luck with,” said Sanchez. “There’s just kind of this fear, especially at the studio level, of Bigfoot movies.”  

[Related: What Bigfoot and the Blair Witch Have in Common]

So Sanchez did what he does best: He went rogue. Working with a relatively small budget, he made a scalable found-footage film set in the woods. “We decided to take matters into our own hands. And write a movie that we can do, just a pretty simple story, really highlight the creature, and make the creature the star.” Sounds like familiar territory, no?

First, Sanchez needed a creature worth highlighting. With help from New Zealand-based Weta Workshop, one of the premiere prop shops in the business; design and effects specialists, Spectral Motion; and veteran creature actor Brian Steele (who, perhaps not coincidentally, played Harry in the Harry and the Hendersons TV show), Sanchez got more than he could have asked for. “That [first] footage blew us away. It really looks like a creature. It doesn’t look like a guy in a suit, it really looks like something that is not human,” said Sanchez.

You can see the creature yourself when Exists opens in select theaters and On Demand on October 24.