Charles B. Pierce | 'Boggy Creek' creator, 71

Charles B. Pierce, 71, an independent filmmaker whose inexpensively made documentary-style drama

The Legend of Boggy Creek

influenced the hit film

The Blair Witch Project

decades later, died Friday at a Dover, Tenn., nursing home. The cause of death was not given.

Born in Indiana, Mr. Pierce grew up in Hampton, Ark., and as an adult lived in nearby Texarkana, where he ran an advertising agency. But it was his 1972 low-budget movie that gained him fame.

"He really did change the face of filmmaking," Arkansas Film Commissioner Christopher Crane said. "With his model, many filmmakers became successful with the drive-in creature feature, so to speak."

The director of the 1999 box-office docudrama The Blair Witch Project, Daniel Myrick, cited Mr. Pierce's film as an influence.

"We just wanted to make a movie that tapped into the primal fear generated by the fact-or-fiction format, like Legend of Boggy Creek, he said in a 1999 newspaper interview. "That was one of my favorites; it freaked me out when I was a little kid. I was beside myself with fear for weeks after seeing that thing."

Boggy Creek was based on a local legend of a Sasquatch-like creature in Fouke, a town southwest of Texarkana, where retailers still capitalize on the fame of what was called the Fouke Monster.

- AP