Review of The Blair Witch Project (1999) by Jane D — 16 Mar 2014

A game changer. This is about three amateur filmmakers, shooting a documentary about the mysterious Blair Witch that is rumored to haunt a forest in Burkittsville, Maryland. Things take a turn for the worse when they lose their bearings in the woods and somebody or something starts toying with them whenever they set up camp for the night.

Now the found footage horror genre has spawned a number of my favorite movies (Cloverfield, [Rec]), but I managed to miss the one that really brought the subgenre to the scene back in 1999, so I decided that it was time to remedy that.

When this was released, it was a phenomenon, and there was extensive debate on if this footage was real or staged. Obviously, rumors have since been debunked on that topic, but I purposely suspended my disbelief that these were actors and found it quite easy to do so.

Everything about this reads authentic, from the low-grade handheld cameras to the improvised naturalistic dialogue, and you are able to buy that these people are a real film crew, wanting to make a documentary.

Now I do understand why there are people out there that outright hate this movie, as this is a horror film that does ask its audience to be patient. While I do subscribe to the 'less is more' theory of horror when properly handled, it can be especially frustrating when there's not a whole lot of payoff at the end.

.. which is something that admittedly left me a bit cold when the credits started to roll. I know that pretty much every found footage horror movie ends with the camera abruptly cutting off, so I was expecting something along the lines of the ending that is featured, but regardless, I wanted to at least see a 3 - 5 second glimpse of the actual antagonist that they built up to for 70 minutes.

The fact that the payoff is as noticeably absent as it is must have given additional credibility that this was real, so more power to this. It doesn't matter how you feel about this, you have to give credit to The Blair Witch Project for paving the way for as many movies as it ultimately did.