Whether you love it or you hate it, you have to respect The Blair Witch Project for its uniqueness and its originality.

Rating: 10/10 (3 September 2000)

One of the many unique things about the Blair Witch Project is that no one liked it. Everyone who saw it either absolutely loved it or absolutely hated it, there was unusually little in between. It should be noted that no one has ever made a professional film like this before. People often joke about a movie being so bad that a student filmmaker could make a better one. Well, a student filmmaker really COULD make a movie like the Blair Witch Project, but the point is that no one has ever made a film this deliberately crude and yet attained such stunning success.
The makers of the Blair Witch Project cleverly avoid the inevitable comparisons to student films by making the actual premise of the film as a student documentary. That's what makes the movie so good! The tagline is about a bunch of kids who went into the woods, got lost, and whose video footage was found a year later. That makes the film itself realistic beyond all other horror films. The methods of production enabled the actors to present an even more convincing portrayal of a bunch of kids lost in the woods and desperate to get out. A lot of times they didn't even know what was going on with the picture, they really WERE lost and confused. Another notable element of this movie is the way that they were able to create such a tense atmosphere with a virtual absence of gore. This is proof that you do not need buckets of blood in order to make a good scary movie.

So many people complained about the shaky camera work in the Blair Witch Project. They say that it was terrible filmmaking because the camera is always bouncing around, but that was done on purpose! Don't these people realize that the home video look was the primary goal for the finished product here? These kids didn't go out into the woods to shoot this documentary with a full-on film crew complete with caterers and everything else, they went ALONE. However, there was a little bit of botched editing in this film. It is meant to be presented as though they found their video cameras, and what you see on the screen is simply what they recorded on their cameras, with little, if any, editing. Obviously the two cameras they used needed to be edited together so that they show the same material, but there was at least one scene where Heather was seen on the opposite side of a stream crossing the log (the one that they had come back to), but her voice is heard as though it is her holding the camera.

Overall, the Blair Witch Project is a very original and satisfying horror movie, but you have to have an open mind. You have to be able to accept something that was made different than your traditional movie is made, and try to really understand what is different about it and what makes it good. I think that one of the best things about the story is that it leaves so much to the imagination. You never see what is actually tormenting them from out in the woods, all you see is the dark, and that makes every individual audience member imagine whatever it is that they fear the most out there in those woods. In this sense, the film is almost interactive. No other horror film has ever come close to doing anything like that, and the Blair Witch Project should be recognized for it. This is an original, entertaining, and ultimately terrifying film, and you see something new every time you see it.