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“Blair Witch, which I consider incredibly fortunate to have been a part of, does come with its own set of baggage,” says Daniel Myrick, one half of the duo who made the found footage phenomenon which scared the hell out of audiences when it was released in cinemas in 1999 and went on to change the face of horror as we know it.

We’re chatting (via Zoom) in the context of Myrick’s new movie, Skyman, a documentary style sci-fi which feels like it could be real, featuring elements of found footage and starring relative unknowns Michael Selle and Nicolette Sweeney, who play Carl Merriweather and his sister Gina. Carl believes he encountered an alien when he was just 10 years old and he’s convinced the being he calls the ‘Skyman’ is going to return for him on his 40th birthday. Along with a documentary film crew, Carl, his sister,...

The mock-documentary Skyman doesn’t tell the usual UFO encounter story. Director Daniel Myrick, who broke on the scene with the groundbreaking horror thriller The Blair Witch Project, does not put this together using found footage. The film examines the aftermath of an alien visitation, and the story is told by a witness and survivor.

Carl Merryweather (Michael Selle) was seven years old when he saw the “skyman” in Barstow, a small town in California. The event changed him. He’s spent years obsessively collecting UFO magazines, as well as first-person accounts of other contactees. It made him the neighborhood “character.” Skyman takes place 33 years after the visitation, he is living with his sister, Gina (Nicolette Sweeney), and waiting on a promise the alien made to return on his 40th birthday.

The film was shot in Barstow, where there have been multiple real life reports of UFO sightings. Merryweather also...

“The Blair Witch Project” is one of the most successful DIY filmmaking stories in history, and while it didn’t invent the concept of found-footage horror, it created a formula that many imitators followed. The “Blair Witch” template yielded 20-plus years of shaky-cam dread, with franchises that ran the gimmick into the ground. The film’s co-directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, kept low profiles as they produced unassuming and often sturdy lo-fi genre movies that never quite crossed over in the same way. Myrick’s latest effort, the understated UFO thriller “Skyman,” follows suit — but more than anything preceding it, at the start of the century.

This time, however, the outcome is less scary than sad. Once again, jittery camerawork and faux documentary footage depict the quixotic efforts to record otherworldly events in the middle of nowhere. In its final moments, the drama builds to the usual blurry chaos and jump scares,...

Thirty years after supposedly coming into contact with an extraterrestrial, Carl Merryweather looks to reunite with "the Skyman" in the official trailer for the latest movie from Daniel Myrick (co-director of The Blair Witch Project).

Written and directed by Myrick, Skyman stars Michael Selle, Nicolette Sweeney, and Faleolo Alailima. Gravitas Ventures will release the film in drive-in theaters on June 30th, followed by a VOD release on July 7th.

Synopsis: "In 1987, just days after his 10th birthday, Carl Merryweather rocked the local news community when he claimed he was visited by an extraterrestrial life form. Despite other alleged sightings reported that same evening, skeptical authorities shrugged off the claims. Now, almost three obsessive decades later, Carl is set on a mission to reunite with the being he calls ‘the Skyman’ to not only prove the skeptics wrong but to ultimately find his own true sense of purpose. Through first-hand home...

Skyman, a new film from The Blair Witch Project’s Daniel Myrick, is set to make its Earthly arrival, set to bring about more fictional-found-footage drama, as evidenced by the release of a new trailer on the occasion of the film’s acquisition by distributor Gravitas Ventures, which has release plans that are intrinsically of the Covid-19 era.

Myrick, who wrote and directed the picture, has returned to his original wheelhouse with sci-fi offering Skyman, which essentially gives the arena of UFOs and close encounters the… well, Blair Witch-type disguised fourth wall treatment, manifesting as a pseudo-documentary. The trailer film debuted at the 2019 Austin Film Festival, held that October, after which it was shopped around.

Skyman Trailer

The Skyman trailer previews a film—centered on a 1987 E.T. incident involving a 10-year-old boy—that does its best to disguise its fictional status by showcasing an array of news broadcasts...

Exclusive: Skyman, written and directed by The Blair Witch Project‘s Daniel Myrick, has been acquired by Gravitas Ventures, which will release the sci-fi UFO pic in drive-in theaters beginning June 30 and on demand the following week. It marks the first feature film since 2008’s The Objective for Myrick, who with Eduardo Sanchez co-wrote and co-directed 1999’s genre-defining found-footage horror classic Blair Witch Project

Skyman, which had its world premiere at the 2019 Austin Film Festival, begins its story in 1987. Just days after his 10th birthday, Carl Merryweather rocked the local news community when he claimed he was visited by an extraterrestrial life form. Despite other alleged sightings reported that same evening, skeptical authorities shrugged off the claims. Now, almost three obsessive decades later, Carl (played as an adult by Michael Selle) is set on a mission to reunite with the being he calls “the Skyman” to not only prove the...