A Witches Brew

Rating: 7/10 (28 April 2004)

(+SPOILERS+) Modern day horror story about a trio of college students Heather Donahue Michael Williams and Josh Leonard going into the woods outside of Burkittsville Maryland in October 1994 to do a documentary on the "Blair Witch". A ghost that has haunted those woods since the founding of the town of Burkittsville in 1810.
Supposedly desecrating an old Indian cemetery in the in the area by building the town there it's felt by the people who live in and around Burkittsville that the "Blair Witch" is responsible for a number of vicious and unexplained murders. The string of killings started in the late 1800's when five hunters were brutally murdered by the stream at Coffin Rock. The killings continued on intermittently up until the winter of 1940-41 with the murder of seven children at the old man Parr house. The children who were still alive were made to stand in a corner and wait their turn, looking at an empty wall, in order not to see Parr murdered the others. Parr was found to be insane but the people of the town feel that he was possessed by the "Blair Witch".
The three students drive out into the woods with their van and then take their video and living equipment in backpacks and go hiking out into the eerie forest. Nothing at first really happens to them until they pass by the haunted Coffin Rock. After a nights sleep in their tent the hikers find themselves in what is an old Indian cemetery with a number of rock piles as tombstones all around them. On their way back to their parked van the next night they hear strange noises all around their camp site and when they wake up the next morning they see the rock piles outside as if they were following them. Things become very weird where the three seem to be going around in circles and even worse Mike for some reason throws away the map that Heather had to help them find their way out of the woods.
After another harrowing night in the forest the hikers find themselves in an area of the woods with Voodoo like symbols and artifacts all over the trees! Panic starts to set in on the three hikers with Josh, not being able to take it anymore, going crazy and running out into the woods away from the other two hikers. Heather and Mike searching the woods, trying to find Josh, later that night hear faint cries coming from what turns out to be an old abandon house,The old Parr house?,in the woods. Mike going in first goes room to room trying to find Josh and finally realizes that the cries are coming from the basement and runs down there, just as the cries started they all of a sudden stop.
Heather screaming for Mike and Josh to answer her also runs down to the basement and then all we see from her video camera is Mike standing in the corner looking into a blank wall, like the children who were killed at the old man Parr house some sixty years ago! Terrified with fear we hear Heather give out an ear splitting cry and the camera falls out of her hand! All we can see from what the video camera recorded is an empty ceiling! Heather Mike and Josh were never seen or heard from again and all that was left of them was the video tapes that they made of their expedition in the woods that made up the movie "The Blair Witch Project".
"The Blair Witch Project" is a lot like the movies directed by the late Jacques Tourneur like "Cat People" in 1942 and "The Leopard Man" in 1943 and later "The Curse of the Demon" in 1957. Tourneur used lights and sounds and shadows to scare the wits out of his audiences not special effects that were so used to seeing in horror movies now.
The the film has over 3,000 IMDb users comment on it as well as taking in over $140 million in domestic ticket sales during it initial release in the summer of 1999 shows the tremendous effect that it had on those who saw it. These two facts, among many others, shows that "The Blair Witch Project" made an impact on the movie going public far bigger than many of it's detractors would like us to believe.