Not only are the actors lost in the woods, so is the film.

Rating: Null/10 (27 August 1999)

The Blair Witch Project flounders helplessly without a cohesive script, stranded in the horror hierarchy just one notch above the story about the escaped mental patient with a claw for a hand. (And then... they found a hook dangling from the car door!)
The Blair Witch Project is a movie that is desperately, desperately in need of a script. It has a story, it even has a plot of sorts. But virtually every line of dialogue committed to film is ad-libbed, and it shows. Painfully. The basic story elements (creepy undefined horror in woods, cocky filmmakers go out to chase it, and the horrible clever ending which I won't reveal) float freely in a swampy morass of random noise from our 3 stars. And every third sentence, of course, invokes that sacred refrain of the indie film, the word 'f**k'.
Being a hard-core fan of H.P. Lovecraft, the basic premise of the Blair Witch Project sounded great to me. Three innocent kids go into the back woods of New England and are driven insane by an unspeakable eldritch horror. Groovy, right? The problem is, the horror is so unspeakable, and so eldritch, that it becomes unfilmable, too. The Blair Witch Project has absolutely zero explanation of the Witch's nature, and the viewer is left more confused than tantalized. I'm not suggesting that what was needed was footage of the actual Witch, but a sense of closure, provided more by the story than the action.
I realize people make a big stink about Blair's 'unorthodox' and 'refreshing' new style, but I prefer to think of it as cheap and insulting. I'm not saying I wanted to see CGI bursting from every frame (perish the thought), but some basic competence would have been nice. I realize the film makers are shooting for the pseudo-documentary look, but the results do not justify the premise. Heck, the movie would have been a lot more interesting if the witch was pitted against a professional documentary crew.
The fact that The Blair Witch Project is so believable actually stems from its greatest weakness: it looks exactly like what would happen if you and your buddies grabbed a camcorder and went off into the woods to hunt ghosts. In the end, what Blair Witch lacked wasn't a larger budget, or special effects, or computers, or big-name stars, but simple screenwriting. It's hard to believe that the directors of the Project had any directing to do; they just had to hunt through the actors' film and edit together a semi-coherent chunk of movie.