Please excuse my incoherent ramblings: I was up late last night watching an over-rated horror film.

Rating: 5/10 (2 August 2010)

I had always thought that arachnophobia—the fear of spiders—was the most common of phobias, but thanks to The Blair Witch Project, I now know better: the irrational fear of small twigs and pebbles is far more prevalent. It's the only explanation I have for the phenomenal worldwide success of a horror film in which stick figures and tiny piles of stones are considered to be the stuff of nightmares?
Whilst I am, of course, fully aware that big sticks and stones can break your bones (as the childhood saying goes), inanimate small pieces of rock and the lesser of branches hold no real fear for me. As a result, I didn't find The Blair Witch Project anywhere near as frightening as the millions who are afflicted by Stickstonophobia (surprisingly, I could find no official scientific term for this widespread condition, so I coined this one myself!).
Admittedly, I did find some of the strange noises that occurred during the night fairly creepy (after all, they might have been made by big spiders), and the way that the film-makers were unable to find their way back to their car was unsettling (I've lost my bearings in the woods myself, and this brought back bad memories), but the ending—when Heather and Mike enter the dilapidated old house at the end of the film—was simply frustrating: surely everyone knows that derelict houses are deathtraps.
Sure enough, both characters lose their footing on the obviously rotten floors and die. Or something like that.