Faux folklore; love it or hate it, it's still ingenious

Rating: 9/10 (17 January 2015)

No other film made in my lifetime has stirred so much hullabaloo as "The Blair Witch Project." Granted, I was only ten years old when the film was released, but I remember its almost immediate absorption into the cultural lexicon; my fifth grade classmates told me stories about it, and how it was real, and how their teenage siblings had let them watch it with them when mom and dad went to bed.
Thanks to an expansive marketing campaign that touted the film as "real footage," "The Blair Witch Project" fascinated and tantalized audiences in 1999. Despite the fact that the film is entirely fabricated, and that everybody knows it, it doesn't change the fact that it captures an unusual realism that enables it to get under our skin in spite of all presupposition.
The premise is simple: three college documentarians go into the woods to investigate the legend of a witch who has been said to be the source of various goings-on in a rural Maryland hamlet over the past century. What starts out as a hunky-dory camping trip slowly edges into a downward spiral of dread as the three find themselves helplessly lost and apparently hunted.
As I mentioned, few films made in my lifetime have stirred up such a hullabaloo as "Blair Witch," and I think few films have also been so polarizing. While it is a true "love it or hate it" film, and oh, are there haters, there still is no arguing that it's incredibly unique. Looking backwards over fifteen years later, the film has spawned an army of found-footage imitators that are still, for the most part, unimpressively smearing their way across cinema screens well into the twenty-first century. Few, if any, are even remotely as unsettling, and most of them are disastrous.
The greatest thing about the film is that it dodges horror tropes in favor of character dynamic and vague suggestiveness. The filmmakers and actors portraying the characters ease potentialities into our heads from early on, interviewing locals about the folklore, relaying stories about purported murders and personal experiences that have been attributed to the witch; playing up the hype of the urban legend. What we don't realize as an audience, is that we very subtly become immersed in the allure and intrigue ourselves— and thus, by the time the characters find themselves at the mercy of nature and experiencing bumps-outside-the-tent-in-the-night, our psyches are impulsively running wild with the evocative power of the folklore that we have been provided. The possibilities of the nightmare here are endless, and that is the true power this film wields, even years later, and even when we know the truth. 9/10.