Potentially scary film ends up annoying viewers, not frightening them

Rating: 3/10 (22 October 2006)

I did not see the fake documentary on TV that was shown before the movie was exhibited in theaters, so I went on what I had read about it.It seemed to have some real potential, but there was a pitfall built in from the beginning: The reported determination of the producers not to show any monsters or maniacs; nothing that the three students couldn't have filmed themselves. This might have been an interesting concept, but it just does not work in the actual movie. I found it really annoying that not once in the entire film does anyone, either townspeople or students, say anything remotely serious or believable about the alleged Blair Witch. The closest it gets to that is when a man is being interviewed and he recounts the true story of the hermit who had murdered some children right at the start of World War Two. But even this seemingly promising thread goes nowhere, as it's never connected to the Blair Witch. Heather stands before a couple of locations, including a cemetery and Coffin Rock, and makes dramatic pronouncements about what happened at these places,without ever giving us a clue as to what she's referring to.The one eerie part that might have really worked up to a genuinely frightening conclusion was the disappearance of the one student, body parts being found, and terrible screams and then his voice calling to the other two for help. I toyed with the idea that a possible explanation is that he went crazy and ran off, hid out, and then murdered the other two. But we are never given any kind of real explanation for the ending. One can only assume that the remaining two students are about to be killed by someone or something, but we have no idea who or what it might be. The audience needs to be shown something, however small or insignificant it might seem. Val Lewton understood this with his RKO Studios horror pictures of the Forties. He and his crew used sounds and shadows and darkness to scare the audience by suggesting something evil was lurking nearby, or something terrible was about to happen.The Lewton pictures show just enough, without overdoing it. Best example: The Leopard Man, 1943. In a small town where an escaped leopard is prowling, a young girl has to go out alone in the dark of night to the store. She has to pass under a railroad bridge. As she starts forward fearfully into the blackness, two glowing eyes stare at her from high up and then disappear. The audience wonders if we actually saw something. A train suddenly hurtles overhead with a terrifying noise and flash of light. As we recover from this fright, there is a closeup of the roaring panther as it attacks the girl! She runs home screaming and begs to be let in, but her mother refuses to open the door. Terrible growls and screams are heard and then a pool of blood slowly puddles under the door. Now, THAT is scaring the audience with very little! There is more fright in five minutes of that film than all tedious 87 minutes of The Blair Witch Project. If only the producers had put one tenth of the imagination into the actual movie as the marketing campaign, they might have really given us a memorable horror film. As it is, The Blair Witch Project is basically nothing more than a clever idea, badly realized.