What ever happened to imagination?

Rating: Null/10 (16 August 1999)

My, oh my, how tarnished we film goers must be in this enlightened age of overblown special effects and Hollywood's appeasement to the lowest common denominator. The results seem to be a desensitized audience with the blurred expectations of a young child whose parents have everything to give. And give too much, they always do.
The Blair Witch Project takes us back to an era of filmmaking when the imagination of the audience is allowed to make its own conclusions. Rather than spoil the child with every imaginable cinema trick and digital nuance, we see him/her reading something like "The Old Man in the Sea." Forget the endless amount of hype (which there was lots of it) and the fact that a $60,000 dollar budgeted film can gross over $100 million in a matter of weeks. Forget about the attempted blurred line between reality and fiction that was imposed by the directors. We all (or most of us) knew going in that this was fiction, but who cares? Sit back and allow your own imagination to fill in the holes.
I truly enjoyed this fresh approach to filmmaking. The set-up for the students as they convened in the beginning, getting ready for the trip, interviewing local residents, getting drunk in the hotel room, resembled so many other home videos that we've all seen at one point or another. A good set-up, I thought, for what was to come. Although Heather Donahue seemed to come off a bit like an ego-driven thespian, I found her characterization to be a warranted contrast against the technical personas of the other two actors. You could say that she represented the spoiled child who in the end was stripped of all her privileges, only to expose a raw emotion that could only stem from pure terror. The psychological breakdown of these characters was brilliant, and only in the sense that their decision making became severely impaired. Their inability to make rational decisions only took them deeper into the forest and the unknown. Having the camcorder running constantly was somewhat of a non-fiction buster, but without that you wouldn't have a movie. And the sound editing, especially the background noises in the forest, we're exceptionally well done. I found myself closing my eyes and trying to discern what those noises were, just as the characters were doing.
"The Blair Witch Project" is a must see. Can't wait to see it on video. I have a feeling it'll be even creepier!!