It may not be appreciated now, more than 20 years later, that when the breakthrough micro-budgeted "found-footage" horror movie classic The Blair Witch Project broke out at Sundance, the filmmakers and their big Hollywood producer played some foxy mind games with the audience. The no-name cast was carefully kept out of sight, and early websites and press releases hyping the picture seeded rumor and innuendo more than fact.
For a few precious weeks/months in 1999, audiences were tantalized—some even partially convinced—that the picture was TRUE, and three young people actually had vanished forever into the bleak Maryland woods looking for a legendary witch (and "two years later their footage was found.")
That magnificent put-on did not long endure beyond the feature's wide, profitable release. But there have been other cinematic efforts that prove repeatedly that pictures can lie—even moving ones—and that extraordinary claims require extraordinary manipulation of the truth.
The following are not just your typical "mockumentary" like This is Spinal Tap, or even conspiracy-propaganda pieces built on dubious assertions, like The Clinton Chronicles. Rather they are standout filmic fabrications that have perpetuated some major myths in our time.
Hunting Big Game in Africa
When he finished his term in office, President Theodore Roosevelt announced he would embark upon an African safari in 1909, accompanied by a cinematographer. While Roosevelt was mingling with Zulus, a vaudevillian, "Colonel" Selig, who had tried and failed to sign his own picture deal with the chief executive, shot this sham expedition film starring a T.R. lookalike and borrowed zoo animals, in a fake jungle set in Chicago. It was more successful on the nickelodeon circuit than was the genuine expedition film, in which Roosevelt failed to catch a lion.
The International House Earthquake Newsreel
Paramount's newsreels brought this to moviegoers in 1933, supposedly an actual Los Angeles tremblor striking as cameras were rolling on W.C. Fields and other actors shooting the ensemble comedy International House. Fields is shown calmly helping the thespians evacuate as the walls shake. Actually, this was staged after the genuine earthquake; accounts are vague as to whether it was just a prank accidentally put into circulation, or whether Paramount pulled the hoax deliberately to scoop competing newsreels (and hype the picture).
Der Fuehrer Schenkt den Juden eine Stadt
As the tide turned against Nazi Germany during WWII and dreadful rumors of the monstrous Final Solution leaked out, this 1944 propaganda picture The Fuhrer Gives a Town to the Jews tried to show that the destination for all the Jews forcibly relocated from German-occupied territories were not horrific concentration camps after all but hospitable and humane places, such as the one here, Terezin (AKA Theresienstad), where robust-looking prisoners enjoy games, music, and crafts.
Of course, it was an elaborate and insane ruse; Terezin was a temporary way-station for the cattle cars en route to Auschwitz. Of the camp's 140,000 estimated inmates, 33,430 died at the "model" prison compound itself, and some 87,000 were deported for extermination in Poland. Various real documentaries tell the story behind this sham one: Paradise Camp (1986), Terezin Diary (1991), and the Oscar-nominated Prisoner of Paradise (2002), which centers on Kurt Gerron, an inmate who directed the hoax film in a desperate bid to save his own life.
The Snuff scare
Cinematic urban legends abound about young victims being murdered on camera for the purpose of entertaining a secretive cabal of depraved viewers (possibly the kernel of this started with the serial killer's MO in the classic 1960 British suspenser Peeping Tom). A great deal of rumor regarding snuff can be traced to a 1971 cheapie exploitation actioner variously known as The Slaughter, American Cannibale or El Angel de la Muerte. Filmed in Argentina by husband-and-wife grindhouse greats Michael and Roberta Findlay, the script depicted the murderous doings of a Charles Manson-style gang, preying on some visiting movie folk.
After the production wrapped, the Findlay's enterprising producer decided to take an extra step of shooting an epilogue that allegedly depicted the bonafide on-camera slaying of the leading lady of the film, considered expendable in post-production. Not only was the gore unconvincing, but the woman being "killed" does not look like her counterpart in the feature!
Nonetheless, under the title Snuff (or The Big Snuff) the new version of the movie gained a somewhat louche high profile—especially as the filmmakers hired their own protestors to demonstrate outside theaters and created the immortal tagline "The film that could only be made in South America—Where life is CHEAP!"
The notion of "snuff films" has gone on to provide fodder for mainstream thrillers such as Hardcore, 52 Pickup, Mute Witness, 8mm, The Brave, and Vacancy. Certainly, executions, suicides, and accidental death have been caught on camera and can be seen in a wide range of films ranging from "mondo"-type exploitation titles like the tasteless Faces of Death series to serious efforts such as the suicide meditation The Bridge (2007). Yet, even after an extensive investigation by international law-enforcement and myth-busters, there remains no documented evidence that snuff movies are a reality, (gulp) yet.
Alternative 003
In the 1991 cult hit Slacker, an Austin, Texas street eccentric babbles about this legendary hour. The English TV prank was an April Fool's Day presentation of the real-life nonfiction TV show Science in Action that brought thousands of alarmed phone calls to the UK station that aired it. Your hosts soberly and methodically relate how investigation into top scientists mysteriously leaving Britain—and testimony of addled American astronaut "Bob Grodin"—uncovers a vast international shadow-government operation to evacuate brilliant minds off of Earth, before eco-collapse renders the planet unlivable and dooms us billions of ignorant left-behinds to extinction.
The elites' destination is Mars, not only habitable but secretly colonized by humans since May 22, 1962 (we're treated to a decoded record of the historic Martian landing and first encounter with alien life). It is so fiendishly well executed that some conspiracy types refuse to accept it as fiction, and Alternative 003 books and websites persist. Believers point out the TV program premiered months after April 1—so there, it cannot be a joke, despite the end-title punchline. Though it had a "formal" video release via the paranormal-themed label Adventures Unlimited, Alternative 003 copies are often pass-along dupes of inferior visual quality, but that only makes the presentation more convincing.
Ghostwatch
Those cheeky Brits again! As a Halloween treat/trick in 1992 the BBC aired this you-are-there scientific investigation into a poltergeist-in-progress at a single mother's low-income flat in North London. During the course of the program, one of the newscasters is revealed faking the eerie noises, but then all hell breaks loose as all-too-real ghostly manifestations take over, apparently catalyzed via the concentrated psychic energy from millions of transfixed TV viewers—there would seem to be a debt here to American writer Robert Arthur's 1941 Weird Tales short story "The Believers" (AKA "Do You Believe Ghosts?").
Even though a reading of the end credits revealed that it was all scripted fiction, no mention of that salient fact was made ahead of time, and a minor flap occurred similar to that accompanying Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. The BBC program was denounced by politicians. Fleet Street tabloids came up with incidents of hysteria and teen suicides they insisted were caused directly by Ghostwatch. Arguments over the psychological damage allegedly inflicted can still be found.
Operation Lune
A hoax about a hoax (that itself is a hoax)? This 2002 French television expose alleged the Apollo lunar-landing achievement was a nefarious fraud engineered by NASA, the Nixon White House, and 2001: A Space Odyssey director Stanley Kubrick as the cinematic genius who pulled off the illusion. But Operation Lune is itself a fraud, using either doctored clips and/or the willing participation of Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, astronaut `Buzz' Aldrin, Kubrick's widow Christiane, and other supposed members of the inner circle, as well as actors bearing character names derived from numerous Hollywood classics.
Over the end credits, at least in the original version, these performers break down laughing when they blow their lines, pretty much a giveaway that director William Karel's mission was to show how easily one can be fooled by media imposture. But there are paranoiacs peddling we-never-went-to-the-moon theories (check out the seriously meant A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, actually aired on Fox Television), and many either thought Karel was telling a real story or released their own bowdlerized and re-edited versions to support their crackpot scenarios. An English-language version orbited the festival circuit under the title Dark Side of the Moon.