If You Go Down To the Woods in the 90s...

Rating: 8/10 (21 January 2014)

The Blair Witch Project, the film that, more or less, created the Found Footage Horror sub-genre; paving the way for the likes of the Paranormal Activities, the RECs, and Cloverfield. But don't judge it on those (really quite average) movies, because The Blair Witch Project is extraordinarily terrifying. Even writing this now, reminiscing about the film is filling me with fear. It really is that scary.
We join Heather, her friend Josh and Mike (hired because he can work a video camera) as they adventure in to the woods to find out more about the eponymous Blair Witch, aiming to make a cheap documentary type movie on the fairly blurred subject. As you can expect, things soon get creepy...
Genre conventions pop up about the place from the off: unwitting teens, small town-folk, and so on, but it really just works as the characters (keeping their real life names as in Found Footage tradition) bicker and gradually break down from fear.
And there's a lot of darkness. As the kids sit within their tent, in a hope that the creepy noises outside won't get them, we, the audience, are forced to watch a blank screen, just listening to growls outside and the scared banter inside. Just like Paranormal Activity, something the makers of that film quite right jumped on, your eyes dart around this screen, literally looking at nothing, as you wait, petrified, for something to jump out at you.
And that's exactly where the film quite rightly collects its haters. Not full of conventional scares, you're supposed to believe in the characters' fears, their terror of what COULD be out there. You're tasked with believing in the possible evil out there, as opposed to bluntly throwing it at you. Yes, there are bits here and there, visible to us which are horrifying, but the real fear? Our fantastic imagination.
Today, almost 15 years on, The Blair Witch Project may well be devalued by its less scary descendants (avoid Apollo 18 at all costs), and perhaps with repeat viewings it could easily become tame. But if today's Found Footage movies are Blair Witch's children, then TBWP is their far smarter, pitch black and, most importantly, scarier dad.
Watch it with the lights off.
Twitter: @JonnyJonJon1