A dark dose of Avant-Garde

Rating: 5/10 (22 October 2011)

This is one of the most hyped movies of 1999 (along with Star Wars, which was more anticipated than this movie). One of the things that helped the movie a lot was the impressive webpage (which I will discuss later) and how it actually adds a lot of background to the movie itself.
The Blair Witch Project is what is called a Mockumentary. That is a fake documentary. A number have been done in the past, and the best ones are those that the viewer is left wondering if it is true or not. Man Bites Dog was incredibly disturbing while This is Spinal Tap left a lot of people wondering who this group was and where they could buy their albums. In fact, Spinal Tap was formed as a direct result of this movie.
The plot to the Blair Witch Project is simple. Three film students go into the woods looking for the infamous Blair Witch and become lost. They are then killed by the Blair Witch. There are a couple of subtle things in the movie, such as the guy at the beginning talking about how a murderer lived in the hills and will force one of his victims to stand in the corner while he killed the other, simply because he could not kill when somebody was watching him.
This is said to be a horror movie and pretty scary. I didn't find it scary, but it was very well made. The you never see the antagonist (except when he or she is running away) and strikes is a very intelligent manner. He strikes only at night, and then kidnaps one of them, yet keeps him alive forcing them to not only come after him, but come after him at night. They are lost but he knows the territory exceptionally well. The movie itself is a little sickening because of the motion of the camera. All of it is done using hand held, and people have been made quite sick with it. Some claim that it is because of the horror, but I don't think so.
In regards to the horror, some have said that it is bad because it is not traditional horror. I am not at all concerned about that, especially since I hate traditional horror. I myself prefer thrillers to horror, and find movies like the Haunting and Nightmare on Elm Street to be very bad.
This I saw not because of the horror or witchcraft, but because of the nature of the film. It is, I believe, one of the first mockumentaries to hit it big time. In fact it has made over $25,000,000US, and even though there might be criticisms about it, this figure is hard to ignore.
Now to the webpage. It is designed to add to the background of the movie. I won't go into it much because you can go there yourself. What I will say is that it forms the background to the movie as putting it in the movie itself would add too much to it and destroy the feel to it. In fact, the movie is just as watchable by itself, but reading the background gives much more to it.