creepy and original horror film

Rating: 9/10 (11 November 1999)

"The Blair Witch Project" succeeds where so many horror films fail because of the sheer simplicity of its conception and design, allowing it to tap far more deeply into a wide range of primal fears than the conventional "fright" films churned out regularly by major Hollywood studios. While the latter films tend to dilute their terror through overplotting, over production and over reliance on special effects, "The Blair Witch Project" eschews all that for creativity, visual inventiveness and an admirable conviction that what is left unseen is often more terrifying than what is visualized.
The film presents itself cleverly as a pseudodocumentary tale of a group of fictional college students who become lost in the woods while endeavoring to film a study of a local scary legend. With this structure, the film creepily conjures up many of the basic anxieties and dreads humans are prone to such as fear of the dark, of being hopelessly lost in an isolated environment, of unidentifiable noises on which one can project one's greatest terrors, of total loss of control against an unknown and malevolent force.
Even more impressive is the way the film expands to become a study of the human psyche when it is placed into a situation of unspeakable fear and desperation. As the characters begin to grasp the gravity of their situation, the forced jocularity begins to be stripped away revealing the childlike terror, guilt, need for recrimination and eventually despair and hopelessness that overtake them. The actors are brilliant in capturing the full gamut of emotions these characters must go through before the preordained tragic end. The film also provides a slyly satirical spin on the obsessively cinematic tone of modern life, wherein every event must be captured on film or videotape, so much so that, even as death is breathing down the necks of these characters, the cameras continue to roll to record it. As one of them says in justification, "That's all I have left." That is her piece of the comfortable world of familiarity that helps her, at least momentarily (if futiley), evade the harsh reality of her situation. Also, these characters pay a high price for the superior tone of cavalier indifference and almost mockery they display towards the tales of the legend they have come to "investigate."
More than any horror film of recent memory, "The Blair Witch Project" gets under the viewer's skin and gives one that feeling of creepy vulnerability that only the best horror films can do.