Review of The Blair Witch Project (1999) by Izzy H — 30 Apr 2014

A very effective terror-horror film, the format of the movie helps the atmosphere a lot and builds itself every time more and more terrifying. It's not for everyone though, as the movie's one dimensional story-telling might bore or bother some people more than horror them.

I have this "theory" that suggest: the really terrifying films are disliked by most of the audiences. Mostly because...well, they do scare. There are films like Alien from Ridley Scott, where we see the monster, although barely and in the dark. There's also Spielberg's Jaws, where the giant shark is kept out of the camera half-the movie, and the other half he's shown without any preparation, and its size was the cherry on the cake. Blair Witch applies a new form: whatever it's the monster or creature, is never ever shown, but cryptic remains or clues of it are there. We don't see the Witch at all, but we do see her actions, and that gives another terrifying power: the imagination. How is she? What is she? How she does all this? Why? It's a huge dilemma. It's purely the unknown, and, as humans, we FEAR the unknown, especially when all we know about it is that it can hurt us, kill us, or even WORSE. It's an ingenious formula, but that's not the only aspect of it.

We also have the perfect location: the woods, in the nowhere, were no one is there to help you, when everything you need is far away, where the darkness is all around once it's the nighttime. And for the worse: it's cursed. You can never get out of there, the more you walk, the more nowhere you're getting. The only places you can found in that loop are creepy areas, both in the day and in the night. Holly shit, that is unbelievable, and surely it's one of the worst places ever. And there, the imagination is at hand yet again: you hear screams and laments at night. What is happening? You'll never know, but you know it's something painful and that gives anybody the creeps!

Also let's look at other things in which this movie succeeds and other found-footage horror films have failed. First, the characters. They're unknowns, so they act like real people, not like dumb horny teenagers, and we identify with their despair at the worst times. I know how hard it is to stay up in the woods, but surely I never got stuck on the middle of the woods and ran for days and days to get to nowhere. It was hard just being there, so imagine how abysmal would it be if all these shit also happen? Sure it can't, but then again, that's what makes this movie work: the imagination. Infinite possibilities, all of them terrifying. All I have to say is: I think it's effective, I can't say that I loved it because it's supposed to be a terrifying experience, and a real one isn't pleasant at all. This one has a combination of both: I love its horror factor, at the same time that made it scary and unpleasant. It was very traumatic for me at first, but in the end, it's just a movie, an experience, not something that should make me shit my pants for the rest of my life.

But no movie is without its flaws. The pacing of this one both helps and hardens the simple thing of sitting through it. It takes patience to enjoy it, and, to be honest, at first I wasn't patient at all. But if I can go through Peter Jackson's three hour epics, and such awful movies like Manos, I can handle this hour and a half horror film. The ending I thought was terrifying and horror-ish, but not everyone will take it the same way, as many would see it as "sporadic" and "rushed". It is hard to gravitate towards it, but personally, this is one of the scariest films I've ever watched. Give it a chance if you haven't see it.