Felt I should offer my first IMDb comment

Rating: Null/10 (2 August 1999)

I saw TBWP on a Saturday afternoon showing, and I wasn't scared that night..or the next night really. Then, tonight (Monday night) I looked it up here and started reading the comments. After the first 20 or so, I felt the need to turn on the lights around the computer and started making sure that the doors were locked. This movie isn't the typical group-of-teenagers-find-a-slasher-and-get-killed-off-one-by-one-until-the-most-annoying-one-is-left (see any of the interminable Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street movies for that). The film itself isn't even scary in the traditional sense, but prefers to take the eerie route. Blood is replaced by far off sounds that could be one of many things. Body parts are replaced by mysterious (in the case of the stone piles, not so mysterious) symbols. The final 10 minutes is probably the scariest 10 minutes I've spent in a movie theater. To my mind, is is a classic psychological thriller that shows what happens to a small group of people trapped in an unknown situation with no obvious signs of escape. The naysayers I've seen on IMDb seem to have a couple of major sticking points. One, they say, is that the script is contrived. Sorry folks, but according to most all reports I've read there WAS no script. The 3 actors were dropped into the middle of a forest with a couple of cameras and a finite supply of food. They were told to shoot their travels through the forest, and then at night the crew would attempt to scare the crap outta them . Their reactions on the screen is the real thing. The only real plotted out point is not following the stream to civilization. The plot and dialogue show that they were following their compass in one direction with little or no deviation, yet still arrived back at the log crossing the stream. Therefore, the supernatural seems to have set in, and it wouldn't have mattered if they had followed the stream, they would have ended up at the same point anyway. To me, the only thing I might have done differently was (after the first strange occurrances) I would have slept during the day and walked during the night with EVERY SINGLE LIGHT I could find blasting. That's just me, though. All in all, the movie was a great film, and was given (during my showing, anyway) the highest accord a horror movie can be granted: when the movie ended, the theater was completely silent. Everyone was too drained to talk about the movie until they were back into the safety of the daylight.