A low budget comedy.

Rating: Null/10 (9 April 2004)

I'm a director, author and screenwriter. I take teams of mostly teenagers out on production to haunted places around the country. Some of those places are without a doubt really scary around midnight or early hours of the darkness. Most of these kids are braver than a lot of adults I know.
Like everyone else I was fooled by the promotional for Blair Witch so I watched it. I laughed nearly all the way through it. Without a doubt one of the worst movies I've ever seen. The writer could have written this screenplay in a few minutes without much thought at all but the PR work is what I find impressive.
The writer did not follow the rules of plot construction. No one ever saw what was killing the students. I've always been one to bend the rules but never to throw them away completely. The audience should have some idea who the antagonist is somewhere in the first 15-20 min of the movie. So they talk about the evil witch but no one ever sees her through the entire movie. Another general rule is the evil should be vanquished. The worse the crime the worse the punishment otherwise there is no viewer satisfaction at the end of the movie. The only people who were punished in this movie were the viewers who paid to see it. A good movie should leave the viewer with some sense of satisfaction but this movie leaves the viewer with unresolved emotions. Like seeing the food but not being able to eat it.
Sometimes the writer instructor will ask students to write a bad movie screenplay so they can see why it doesn't work. But the Blair Witch group wrote a bad movie script and through their PR proved it did work, at least once. At some point in a student's life they like to prove their instructor wrong at least once.
I do admire the fact that a movie can be made for around $8,000 and bring in more than $140,000,000. But it sends the wrong signal to producers all over the world telling them to buy bad movie scripts. Believe me that's 90+% of what Hollywood is doing these days.
I could turn my kids and some of their friends loose in the woods with a video camera or two and I'm sure they could do at least as well if not better, without a script, than the Blair Witch cast and crew did with one. And I'll bet they could do it for around $1,000. You might think this is all pretty amazing but have you checked to see there were a few attempts to get on the Blair Witch band wagon, producers trying to make look alikes and they failed big time. Evidently the magic only worked once. The people wised up and won't fall for Blair Witch type PR tricks again. This tells you the majority of the people who saw it didn't like it and wouldn't do that again.
I'm glad the cast and crew of the Blair Witch project did well in their effort to fool the public. I'm glad they made a great deal of money for a very little investment. But to me the movie was a comedy not a horror movie. And it was poorly done. It takes a master PR person or someone with the gift to turn a looser like this into a winner but they did it with style. If someone asks I will tell them "Sure watch it. Decide for yourself if you like it or not."