If you go down to the woods, PLEASE take more than one camera

Rating: 6/10 (30 May 2010)

After seeing this film way back when it was released I came out of the theatre struck dumb and feeling rather nauseous. Not due to anything horrifying up on the screen - if only there had been - but simply down to the jerky and repetitive camera-work.
Blair Witch is an admirable idea, yet the directors stick too rigidly to their premise. By using one camera they induced seasickness in me, and no doubt a good many other people going by the comments at IMDb. To provoke fear you often have to create a sense of scale and movement - think Jaws, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho to name but three. Fear is just as much about open spaces and a sense of isolation as it is about dark corners and close-ups.
Clearly the premise of the film - three film students, missing for five years - demanded certain limits on the storytelling, yet sometimes you have more to play with than you realise. If the story is that compelling, and in fairness the Blair Witch idea was good, no matter what the vengeful critics say, then you wonder how much better this film might have been had suddenly a second camera appeared, tracking the threesome through the woods. Told lucidly enough, the audience would probably not even question it.
Some of the reviewers of this film have been harsh to put it mildly. No, it's not a great horror film, but it is an important one if for no other reason than it shows what can be done with basic equipment and a few thousand dollars.
As I write this review, some ten years or so after seeing Blair Witch for the first time, we are in the middle of a recession, yet what d'you know, James Cameron has just spent $300million making Avatar, some ten years after spending $180million to make Titanic.
Perhaps what's really bugged the film industry, and even some of the audience, is that two young film-makers found a way to dwarf the mega budget releases of Hollywood with a film that made more money than 90% of Hollywood, yet for no more than thirty thousand dollars.
Blair Witch is not great, but it does have something important to say; namely that you don't HAVE to have a $300million budget in order to make a hit film these days. That surely, is reason to be hopeful.