If a movie keeps me awake at night, then it's REALLY SCARY.

Rating: Null/10 (21 October 2000)

I have a simple criteria for judging a scary movie: It has to keep me awake at night. If it does, it's scary.
The Blair Witch Project did this brilliantly. I kept waking up in the middle of the night and glancing into the corners of my room, expecting to see Josh standing there, facing the corner.
The first I heard of The Blair Witch Project was when I saw a TV interview with Heather Donahue, where she was talking about how this movie was made, where the actors were out in the woods, with minimal script, and the film's producers were doing creepy things at night to scare them. The concept really intrigued me, so I decided to go see it, even though I almost never go to see horror movies - slasher films bore me.
So when I went to see the movie, months after it had been released, I knew it wasn't real, and the hype surrounding the film didn't affect my expectations.
I also went to see the movie alone, in a theater that was almost empty. This movie was meant to be seen alone. I had heard that the "earthquake video" filmmaking technique was upsetting, but I honestly never really noticed it.
What made this film so brilliant was the fact that you never saw what it was that was hunting them. We never knew what it was all about, and so, like any good ghost story, your mind and imagination is left to fill in the blanks - and my imagination is FAR more terrifying to me than anything a filmmaker could spoon-feed me.
I think therein lies the crux of why some people didn't like Blair Witch - they wanted the filmmakers to tell them everything, show them everything, spoon-feed them the horror. If that's what they wanted, then they were bound to be disappointed.
The brilliance of this film is that it lets the viewers scare themselves, with all sorts of personal demons and "what if" thoughts.
Because it's what's inside your own skull that is truly terrifying. Not what is put on to the screen.
I give The Blair Witch Project a 10 out of 10 - it goes down on my list as one of the most terrifying movies of all time.