The Scariest Movie Ever

Rating: 10/10 (16 July 1999)

This film is so scary because it is so pure. It never abandons its two main conceits: the documentary footage, and the invisibility of the terror. The result traps you in a way that other horror films fail to. You never see the hatchet man waiting around the corner, you never peer through a bedroom window, you never have a point-of-view removed from the characters. The effect of this, drawn out over 90 minutes, is startling, especially to viewers accustomed to the tongue-in-cheekiness of Scream, the irony of which purposely distances us from the character's terror. In Blair Witch, there is no distance: we see what they see, we feel what they feel.
The facelessness of the terror contrasts with the other horror films that stay with you days afterward. The Shining and The Exorcist, for example, both put a demon of sorts inside of an ordinary human. Your fear comes from watching what these humans-gone-awry do to other people, and from the implication that the "demon" is really just a malevolence lying dormant inside each of us, or at least inside someone you know.
By contrast, Blair Witch lets the terror inhabit the woods, immutable and insuperable. In The Shining, there is always the hope that Jack will come to his senses or Danny will escape. In The Exorcist, you can hope that the little girl will just "go back to normal." There is no such hope in Blair Witch.
There are a hundred places in this film where it could have gone wrong, but amazingly, the cast and crew pulled it off without a hitch. A few of the film's early moments don't ring quite true, but these incidents are minor, and forgotten as soon as the kids get into the woods.
Once they get there, it is impossible to take your eyes off the screen. As one of the characters says (roughly), "I'm afraid to close my eyes, but I'm afraid to keep them open."
It is amazing how potent the film's photography is, in light of the actors being the chief camera operators. The ad hoc nature of the photography is nonetheless gripping, as the film's publicity shots reveal. Among the thousands of shots that comprise the film, though, it is one that most stands out in my mind: the film's final image will never leave me.