If you go down to the woods... I met a witch once; it was in the 80s. I was a Cambridge PhD student and, in the normal way of things, found myself at a luncheon on High Table at Christ's College, where another guest, a very elegant American woman called Tanya Luhrmann, seated next to the beaming Professor Christopher Ricks, introduced herself to me as a witch. She told me all about her initiation into some of the very many covens thriving in modern Britain. Her experiences (subsequently published by Picador: Persuasions of the Witch's Craft, by TM Luhrmann), coupled with the help she gave me afterwards with my own research into 17th-century ritual practices, made me reluctant - then as now - to come up with any pointy-hat or broomstick-related gags. There is, however, none of her scholarly sense of ritual magic's moral complexity in The Blair Witch Project, the stunningly effective, lower-than-low-budget movie by the young guerrilla directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick which has taken America by storm: Blair Witch presents witchcraft as a virile and profoundly contemporary evil. The 'on dit' about this film is that it does not "live up to its hype". Quite incorrect. The hype, particularly the nerdy backstory to it proliferating on all the websites, is actually the only boring thing about it. Because the picture itself is very remarkable indeed - brilliant in its sheer macabre clarity and simplicity. It is not a horror film; in fact its success makes the