Best horror movie in years!!

Rating: 10/10 (25 July 1999)

Less can be more, and for 'The Blair Witch Project' less means more realistic and more terrifying. Despite (or because of) no gore or special effects, a better horror movie will not be released this year. The mockumentary follows three young film students into the Maryland woods in search of the legend of the Blair Witch. The movie itself offers little about the history of the legend. Glints of information are presented as hearsay and gossip from the interviewed townsfolk and a turn of the century text on the little known legend. It works to the picture's benefit, as does the grainy feel of the handheld footage comprising the entire picture. The result is an impossibly heavy tone of mystery, paranoia, and hysteria that builds layer upon nerve fraying layer. The writers and directors understood what it takes to make an effective horror movie. They constructed likeable and believable characters. We're not watching a platnum bimbo and mindless frat boy being stalked by a faceless menace, we like and want the three young students to make it. Secondly, they understood that what we can't see is always scariest. The beast is never as frightening or as real on screen as it is in our craven minds. 'The Blair Witch Project' is the ultimate campfire story.