Good, not great. Don't believe the hype.

Rating: Null/10 (9 August 1999)

The Blair Witch Project - ***
In October of 1994, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams hiked into Maryland's Black Hills Forest to shoot a documentary about a local legend, "The Blair Witch." They vanished, never to be heard from again. One year later, their footage was found. It records the filmmakers' frightening five-day journey into the woods and captures the events that led up to their disappearance.
The Blair Witch Project was unveiled to the world at the Sundance Film Festival, where it generated tremendous buzz. Glowing word of mouth has followed the picture ever since. Critical quotes such as "Scary as hell" and "The scariest film since the Exorcist" have been splashed across newspaper and television ads. Audience interest is so high that the two screens in Washington, DC which run the film sell out days in advance. Given all of this hype, my disappointment in the movie was inevitable. If you walk into the theater expecting the scariest experience of your life, chances are you will be let down. However, I suspect that if I had walked into the movie cold, with no expectations and no knowledge of the hype or the reception in Park City, I would have been pleasantly surprised.
To be clear, The Blair Witch Project is not a true documentary. The three people we follow are portraying themselves, and the Maryland locations are authentic. But the actions are staged (as are the fates of the characters.) Unlike Drop Dead Gorgeous (another mockumentary), this one is so believable, so successful in its authenticity, that many people are fooled into thinking it is real. Directors Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick shoot only in 16mm and High-8, the film stocks available to the three lead characters. While this crudity of form sometimes impinges on the viewer's ability to discern what is happening (what IS that wrapped in the cloth!?!), it is essential in establishing the documentary's authenticity. Indeed, the unclear sound and the limited night vision only add to the movie's bag of scary tricks. The Blair Witch Project, with its low budget and documentary feel, relies upon implied menace to scare its audience. It does not use CGI or state of the art make-up effects. It uses piles of rocks and twigs bound together. (I'm not kidding.) I rather enjoyed this new slant on terror, and admired the ingenuity employed to actually make piles of rocks menacing.
The film possesses a certain streak of artfulness not typically found in a Hollywood horror movie. I was particularly intrigued by an implied theme about moviemaking in general: It must be lived to be authentic. Three students set out to film a movie about a scary legend. But when they get lost in the woods, they forget about shooting their planned documentary and instead shoot "behind the scenes" footage of the trio's quest for civilization. Only when they deviate from the script and abandon any pretense of being outsiders or observers do they REALLY document the power of the Blair Witch legend. In essence, they must become a part of the story in order to capture the story. The entire form of the film, a mock documentary, serves to emphasize this principle.
Is it scary? Yeah, sure. It is scary in the same way that most horror films are scary - some guy is walking backwards through the dark and you just know he is going to get an ice pick in the eye. But it is not bone-chilling terrifying, like The Exorcist or The Shining. Quite to the contrary, the first two thirds of the movie is quite funny as it traces our filmmaker's journey through Burkittsville while interviewing the locals. Only in the final act does the tension really take hold. Even then, it does not reach its stride until the final sequence, when our intrepid filmmakers stumble upon that house...