Forget The Exorcist, this is REAL horror!

Rating: 10/10 (20 October 1999)

Prior to seeing this flick for the first time, Scream was my favourite horror movie. Now, don't get me wrong, I still love Scream (sequel sucked in a big way - still lookin' forward to 3 though) but with Blair Witch I came to realise the way in which the previously (in my eyes anyway) infallible Scream failed. Despite the sexy, beautiful girls and cool guys, despite the witty, fun pop culture refs, despite the neat little murder mystery, Scream still spoon-fed the audience, albeit in a more interesting way. The opening scene with Drew was and always will be an awesome piece of cinema, but at the end of the day, there's a psycho, with a knife, wanting to kill a pretty girl - it's something we've all seen countless times before and if you're a hardened horror fan like myself, something you kinda grow numb to. It doesn't really have any effect, or at least not the effect the director wants it to have.
Blair Witch treats the audience like a sadistic little kid to his younger sister. He wants to scare her, he loves getting a rise out of her, he knows what buttons to push. TBWP invites you on a trip where our everyday common fears come into play - most people were at one point of their life or another scared of the dark, or at least wary, some still are. The horror accelerates in a painfully real way, where we are at first allowed to know the characters and can easily view them as real people, none of them remotely conforming to any movie stereotype, each with faults and shading - we can relate to them and when the **** hits the fan, we feel all the more for them, thus the fear we will feel becomes far more palpable and painful than Scream could ever hope to achieve.
I've noticed how, on the IMDB Blair Witch voting page, 10 is, of course the most popular mark, while 1 is the second most. What can I say, people still need to be spoon-fed, like little babies. They bitch about how there's no blood or monsters to be seen, how there's too much shaky camera or about the swearing, the arguments. To these people I say "feel free to use your brain once in a while - that's what it's there for." Oh yeah, and go watch The Haunting.