Simplicty, brillance, effectiveness - a deadly combination

Rating: 10/10 (3 November 2003)

The Blair Witch Project is, in my humble opinion, a masterpiece of clever use of minimal resources, hype, selective leakage of information and superb disinformation that made a film that cost a pittance into a spectacular success. It did this not by trying to defy its humble origins but indeed it played on them in the most effective way; it used its amateur feel and low budget appearance to make it look all the more real and this was backed up by hyping people into believing that it was indeed real (at least for a time).
Even when they realised that they had been `duped' so to speak they were intrigued (as was I) to find how this had been done to so many people so effectively. The film came out very late in Australia (so we could cop the 2nd hand prints from the US) but I had purchased it on DVD from the US about two months before its theatrical release and had read a great deal about it and the hype surrounding it before even I saw it.
It was intriguing to note the trickle of broken information that made it even here, others had heard this or that about this new film and many even believed it to be real - the thing was everyone wanted to see it very badly.
Not everyone who saw it was effected by it - some didn't get it, some didn't like it, some weren't scared by it (one friend of mine borrowed the DVD and she watched it at midday with the lights all on and the windows open cuddled up with her border collie on the sofa; she deliberately tried to minimise the scare impact, I tend to show it with all the lights off and around midnight!).
Others had heard too much real information for the hype to have worked properly - but that's ok, I watched the film to see what they had tried to do and how they had tried to do it and I was enormously impressed by how someone took what they had and used simplicity and ingenuity to make something work so well.
This is a film that is special in many ways, like Orson Wells' radio play of `War of the Worlds' and even Ghostwatch (1992) on the BBC, this film can lull the viewer into a sense of what they are seeing is real and even if you know it isn't in the proper environment it can still send chills down one's spine and leave the shattered illusions in their mind for days afterwards. It works on a minimalist approach not widely seen for a long time and they do it very very well; indeed this was the first DVD I ever purchased and it is still one of my favourites.
Not only is it a different type of horror film - it's a different type of film all together (from almost everything else I've seen) and in this day and age of repetition that's quite an achievement.
It's a shame the sequel was just so bloody awful, it had none of the feeling or atmosphere of the original.