If this doesn't scare you, no film will

Rating: 10/10 (20 March 2000)

Few films manage to capture the starkly shattering fear of encountering that which is beyond human ken. Of realising that once you step beyond the glow of the self-congratulatory campfire called human civilisation, you find yourself a shivering hominid a million years in the past confronting the Outer Dark, and all bets are off.
The impressively negative popular reaction to what, ironically, was an extremely popular film, says something about how comfortable, cynical, and amazingly unimaginative First-World humans really are nowadays. We live in the age where a gun isn't scary until it's pointed directly at you, if even then...so asking people to remember how to use their imaginations is probably a lost cause.
But that's unfortunate, because _The Blair Witch Project_ is in a class by itself in the Horror genre, and deserves to scare people paranoid. It's a work that translates the "diary found in a cabin" idea popular among writers like H.P. Lovecraft, to film. It demonstrates amply, despite all the jaded critique, how quickly the human mind breaks down outside of reassuring frames of reference. And it looks real.
This film cost me sleep, had me looking over my shoulder, distrusting curtains, groups of trees, and open dark doorways for days. It scared me silly, and it still does. Even writing this review scares me. It's one of those films, like John Carpenter's _The Thing_, or Kubrick's _The Shining_, that gets scarier the more often one perceives it, and the more thought one puts into the dilemma. If you're at all empathic, and if modern life hasn't dulled your sensitivity to the Unknown completely, you'll probably find this film disturbingly effective.