Wonderfully effective

Rating: Null/10 (26 March 2001)

It's hilarious to see how many people are still complaining about this movie! The funniest are those that say things like, "If you REALLY want to be scared go see 'The Sixth Sense'" (only if you're scared by plodding, predictable storylines) or, "I could do that in my own backyard with a video camera." Naturally, these comments are coming from those film aficionados who are eagerly anticipating the latest DMX/Steven Segal schlock-fest.

The truth is that The Blair Witch project was a very experimental film that was picked up by the mainstream and flung into every frathouse theater in America. Naturally, the lemmings that make up the bulk of the American movie-going audience will go see ANYTHING that the media tells them to (which, incidentally, explains Hannibal) regardless of whether-or-not they even like - let alone understand - that particular genre. It would be like me going to see a movie like Il Postino and saying it sucks because no one speaks english in it.
With more and better technology at their disposal, film makers are becoming less and less able to actually craft a film. Everything is completely at their disposal - and if it isn't then they can just "CG" it into existence. Imagine how stupid Jaws would have been if Spielberg could have had ILM animate a bunch of gruesome, underwater feeding scenes. It would have become Deep Blue Sea. What if Ridley Scott had a computer animated alien running around in Alien. It would have become as stupid as Alien 3 and 4. The point is that horror works best when given very little information to process. The anticipation of the gunshot is far more frightening than the gunshot itself. (Hitchcock?)
We as an audience have terribly short attention spans when it comes to being entertained. Long stretches of dialogue bore us, everything needs to happen immediately and all the time or we tune out. What's happened now is that we've lost any idea of what reality looks or feels like. When someone says that the fear in Haley Joel Osment's character was more believable than the fear in Heather Donahue's character then I know we have become completely disconnected.
I'm not saying that The Blair Witch Project was the greatest movie ever made - it certainly had its flaws - but it was most definitely a remarkable film. Horror is always subjective so saying it just wasn't scary is a pointless argument to make concerning it's validity. Perhaps it's greatest flaw was that it was so widely released. Kinda like giving Latour '75 to winos and expect them to comment on bouquet and finish. Hopefully, someone will pick up where TBWP left off and we'll all be rewarded with something resembling substance rather than the Hollywood style that we've been spoonfed for so long now.