Its only merit is suggestion

Rating: 4/10 (20 January 2015)

The Blair Witch Project is, according to what I've read, supposed to be a scary movie that plays cleverly on psychological suggestion and I shouldn't watch it alone!
So I did.
First of all, I must say that the acting is rather convincing in terms of 'realness' of the characters; perhaps the 'raw footage' style filming helps in that but purely in terms of acting and the tapes seeming authentic in that regard it's well done. It was a clever combination of acting, seemingly raw footage and improvisation and the actors not knowing IRL how it will all exactly unfold.
The characters are annoying though and especially Heather is the last person you'd want to go on any kind of trip or holiday with. That aside, as the story began I had some hopes due to the reviews about how nerve wrecking it'd eventually become but I found myself waiting all the time for that moment to come. In the movie, the situation gradually starts to get more out of control and the group (which wasn't a winner combination anyway) experiences disputes and distrust almost right from the get-go. However, it gets out of control because of the sheer stupidity of the group, NOT because of the horrors that lurk in the woods. Okay... fine. So there's that.
The nights are supposed to be the moments where your tension really starts to rise. Creepy, weird things happen that gradually increase in severity but nothing completely overly dramatic, I suppose to still give it a sense of 'realism'. The days are used to illustrate how they mess up the situation, how the group is getting more lost every day and how the morale dies a not-so-silent death. In that sense it's a nice dynamic but I didn't find myself dreading nightfall, and the only 'fear' I felt was more close to by proxy annoyance caused by imagining how it must suck to be stuck with these people, being lost in a forest with a decreasing food supply and understanding that the situation in general wasn't fun at all. But... the 'witch' was hardly a part of it!
If well done, certain creepy things, hints or ''how is that possible/where did that come from''s can give you this creeped out gut feeling, the feeling or thought of 'what the hell...!' In the Blair Witch Project there was an attempt to do specifically that but this time it really didn't work for me. Perhaps that's just my (lack of ;) ) taste but I'm the kind of person to be creeped out by suggestion more than the plain monsters yet this didn't really do it. The piles of rocks and the wooden sticks were slightly odd and don't ask me why as I lack the answer, but it somehow wasn't significant enough to give me any hint of ''that's creepy'' or ''wow that's weird''. The daylight parts are to illustrate how the group falls apart and experiences all kinds of stress but it doesn't really build tension for me. There's little mystery and I'm watching the constant arguing, immature behaviour of annoying people who're lost in a forest but there's no increase in 'scare' for me. The nights feel like unrelated intervals.
So we have the combination of getting lost in a big forest, weird sounds and other occurrences in increasing severity in the night, the increasing arguing in a per definition doomed group and eventually a big anti climax.
I get the thing about suggestion and the group losing unity, it supposedly adds to the scare that nobody knows what to do, that they're basically trapped and that everyone's getting really stressed out. Then there're the 'definitely creepy' things like the rock piles. I get it! But it doesn't do it for me. When I dread the thing of 'being lost with these sucky people in a big forest with no food' more than 'being lost and there's the main antagonist of local horror legends playing mind tricks with us' it has missed some marks. Perhaps too heavily dependent on suggestion and thereby going too far/a bit overboard, or maybe it's the lack of actual build of tension other than showing a stressed out, angry group, but it didn't leave me scared.
I'll give some stars for the concept because that could've been great and the acting was convincing.