An interesting novelty, but hardly the exercise in terror it's purported to be.

Rating: 4/10 (19 July 1999)

I, like countless others, have waited with bated breath for this film to be released. At last, a true horror film, one that will follow me home.
Alas, this is not that film.
It is an accomplishment, in that same way that other ultra-low-budget VISA-financed films are an accomplishment. It is also an accomplishment in the way it was filmed, as the epitamy of cinema verite. But it is not a good horror film.
Structurally, far too much screen time is spent establishing that the team is lost; how they get lost, how they get more lost, how they stay lost, and how they bemoan the fact that they are lost. The vast majority of the film's running time is spent establishing this simple fact. Only the remainder is dedicated to the nocturnal haunting and hunting of the group. This is a serious miscalculation (one likely borne of the filmmaker's methodology - one has to wonder how much night footage was usable, and how willing they expected an audience to be to stare at a blank screen in a too brightly lit theatre), a miscalculation that has the net effect of mutating the film into something more akin to a '70s-era ABC Movie of the Week than the future of horror.
The film also suffers from its failure to establish any of the three main characters as the skeptic, the audience's voice of reason, their proxy on-screen. The skeptic is vital to the suspension of disbelief in a horror film. The skeptic argues that it's nothing more than a lesion in the temporal lobe, and not Satan, that makes little Regan act so poorly. The skeptic says Camp Crystal Lake is NOT haunted, that there's nothing to be found in the empty rooms of the Overlook Hotel, and there's no reason we shouldn't go to sleep tonight. WE know the skeptic is wrong, because those are the rules, and we expect him or her to either die gloriously or receive their come-uppance in some other spectacular manner. WE know the skeptic is wrong. But we need the skeptic nevertheless. Without the skeptic, we're asked to believe that three adults will be overcome with horror over the sight of a pile of stones in the woods, that they'll lapse into hysteria at the spectacle of some stick-people totems. This is ludicrous.
Much, too, has been made of this film's "unseen" horrors. True, a great number of the most nerve-jangling scenes in horror film history have been of the unseen: remember the door to Regan's bedroom, a thin wooden barrier between us and the horrors beyond; remember 90% of Robert Wise's original "The Haunting". These are clear examples of the horror of the unseen. But they are horrifying not MERELY because they are unseen, but because we KNOW something is there. Often, we think we've seen bits of it out of the corner of our eye. There, in the carvings on the walls of Hill House - was that a face? Or we can hear it - that nerve-shattering banging in the halls. But there's always some clue we've been given to seed our fear. And what does the Blair Witch give us? Seven piles of rocks, then three piles of rocks, one bundle of sticks, and a partridge in a pear tree. These are hardly harbingers of doom.
And what do we hear? Well, every night the deranged understudies of the Broadway musical STOMP will stop by your tent and beat out a rhythm on some rocks they have. Please...if you want to hear the sounds of horror, play back the aforementioned sequence from The Haunting at high volume some night, or catch the first half of Wm. Peter Blatty's much-underrated "Exorcist III" for some real sounds from the devil's boombox. By comparison, the rock clattering of the Blair Witch isn't even worth a witty analogy.
The Blair Witch Project is an interesting novelty, and is deserving of a footnote in the annals of film history. However, in the catacombs of horror movie history, it's merely an also-ran.