Great premise & great ending; otherwise flawed

Rating: 7/10 (4 November 2005)

I liked the Blair Witch Project, but I didn't love it. What I *did* love was the Blair Witch website that accompanied this film's release and also the mock-documentary that aired on the Sci Fi channel. If you read the website thoroughly and see the mock-documentary and THEN you watch the movie, it all adds up to a thoroughly frightening experience. Unfortunately, those extras were necessary because the movie itself left out a lot of crucial information vital to "getting" the full import of the story and imagery.
Still, the film did tap into (and probably fed) the growing fascination with "reality" TV and films, and it used the trick on which camp ghost stories have always relied. It's really scary to be trapped in a place where something scary was REALLY supposed to have happened. Since most of us go into the woods at some point we can imagine how terrified the movie's kids must have been, and we can feel some of that terror ourselves if we think about the allegedly "real" imagery when we're out in the woods.
One final note: the "reality"-based scare tactic wasn't even all that original. In 1992 the BBC aired a mock documentary called "Ghostwatch" that pretended to be real, live-broadcast investigative journalism. Its shocking ending so terrified the television audience that it elicited hundreds of phone calls and was never aired again. THAT was a real landmark moment in mass media, right up there with Orson Welles' radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds."