Look past the backlash

Rating: Null/10 (30 April 2003)

Funny, but had this film not been so incredibly succcessful, I imagine people would be much more likely to praise it. It's hard for any film to live up to the hype that surrounded this one. Try to take a step back and judge the film on its own merits. It's innovative and very effective. It's actually a miracle how good the movie is, considering the conditions under which it was made. The directors and edit should receive major credit for making something out of the footage they had.
And the acting was superb. Please don't say that it wasn't really acting. That's absurd. This isn't a hidden camera situation. These three actors knew exactly what was going on - they were shooting a movie. Sure, the film crew tried to scare them, but in the end these three were acting. The fact that so many people claim that the actors weren't acting is just testament to how well they acted. We bought every second of their act. As Heather Donahue was quoted as saying (and I'm paraphrasing here), "A pile of rocks is not scary." Meaning, there was a lot of acting going on.