Boo! Scared? You should be!

Rating: 8/10 (29 October 1999)

The Blair Witch Project is a truly scary mind trip of a movie. It is a movie that is best seen without listening to all the hype thats going on, and best watched alone or with your partner.
The concept is simple, think Cannibal Holocaust, which the film makers admit as being inspirational. 3 college film makers enter a forest in Burkittsville to explain the legend of the Blair Witch. Legend has it that the forest is haunted and many children disappeared a century or 2 earlier.
When in the forest, they get lost, how original. They are haunted, but the question is.... by what? Is it a ghost or is it some lunatic, theres a nice reference to Deliverance by one of the characters. What is certain is they don't make it out of the forest, as you are told from the beginning.
What you are actually watching is the hours and hours of footage they managed to shoot which was found after they went missing, and edited down to 90 minutes.
Thats the original bit, along with the fact that you are watching raw footage of what actually happened in real life. The actors were given little food and were told to go into the forest for a week, camping, no civilisation for the entire shoot. Each actor only had their lines given to them, no one knew how the others were going to respond. Thats scary enough, without the directors firing gunshots at 3 in the morning and making weird stick things to freak them out.
By the end of the shoot the actors aren't just acting, its true emotion, they really are stressed out, they really are cold, and they really do want to get out of the damn forest.
So sit back in the dark, switch the lights off and be scared.