Review: The Blair Witch Project

Reviewing The Blair Witch Project is gonna be a challenge cause a film I have to take into consideration the timing. In particular the mystery and the marketing behind this film that was made for a shoestring budget and made back over $200 million based on its marketing as a true life horror film. Of course over the years we now know it's a fake but that leads to the interesting question of whether the film lives and dies by its reality claim or does knowing it's all staged still make it work as an effective horror movie.

Set over the course of a few days in Maryland, the film follows three students, Heather, Josh and Mike, as they travel to Burkittsville to document on The Blair Witch, a local ghost story that has been around the town for over 200 years but has not ever been recorded before. After interviewing the locals about the legend of the Blair Witch the three of them head into the woods to try and find where it's reported she stays.

What starts as a happy but tiring experience into the woods slowly turns more sinister as strange noises, exhaustion, hunger and a lost map that puts them going round in round in circles starts to eat away at the group, leaving them angry, scared and constantly arguing with one another. As the days and nights drag on the fear that something or someone is toying with them starts to sink deeper in as one by one they lose themselves and actually start believing that The Blair Witch is real.

The only thing known about the film was that none of them were seen again. Of course we all know that's a lie but look at it from the point of view of it being real, it does feel very realistic, there's really not a lot going on at times so when something does happen it stands out as abnormal. The story isn't really anything deep but it takes the documentary approach of making it feel like a real film, like this actually happened and because it's found footage we only ever see what the camera sees leaving a lot of the film in the dark, enhancing the creepy factor.

The characters are strange as well, because they're not all that deep but they're just playing regular people and they come across as natural, I know a lot of dialogue was improvised and it comes across like a much more realistically styled film with the central fracturing relationship between the three leads all breaking at the same time.

Heather was arguably the lead character since it's her that leads the group into the woods and insists she knows what she's doing. She's also the one with the camera, feeling a constant need to document everything, much to the annoyance of the others. Heather's mental collapse is one of the main arcs of the film, she's trying so hard to take control but because she is the one in charge she gets the blame from the others and it all pressures down on her to the point where she doesn't know what will kill her first, the fear of the Blair Witch or the exhaustion from being lost, hungry and scared. One thing must be said is that her screams of fear and terror sound pretty fuckin genuine.

Josh comes across as the main source of anger and hatred in the group, primarily because of his constant head-butting with Heather. He's the first to start getting on at her because they're lost then when she starts to lose herself he gets on her for not having an answer. He's a bit of an asshole at times but you can see where he's coming from, he's lost in the woods with someone who dragged him out there and he's looking for somebody to blame, Heather being the logical choice. His instigation and fury over his situation puts the whole group on edge and is a key point to their downfall.

And finally Mike plays the middle ground, he has his moments of doubt with Heather, in fact he's the reason they lose their map because he doesn't trust her with it, when things get really bad he actively looks to her for help, seeing more help as a group rather than Josh's idea of ganging up on her. He's just like them. lost, scared and fuckin sick of Heather's obsession with the camera but he knows the best course of action is to keep their heads, stop fighting and try to work it out.

All three of them have that natural quality to their acting, cause they don't try to make these characters really deep or interesting and barely mention their back stories it comes across like they really are this group of students that followed a good idea and ended up in Hell. I've heard complaints about the acting in this film but I never saw it, I actually thought the group did a solid job at portraying that growing sense of fear and isolation.

Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick directs this film in their debut and they does a good job of it. While time and knowledge have taken away from the scare factor of the movie, you can still see this is a well-made flick. First and foremost the Found Footage Angle. Yes this is arguably the film to popularise the now much hated genre but in this film it works, these are students filming a documentary, of course they're gonna be filming everything. Plus as mentioned before since the action is focussed entirely through the eyes of the camera we don't see everything which adds to the general fear and creepiness of the film, a strange sound in the distance, a discovery of voodoo symbols, a sudden and strange disappearance, they're all the scarier because you can't explain it and you can't explain it because you can't see it and it leaves your imagination to run wild.

This is key to one of the best elements of the film, the fact that you never see The Blair Witch, you don't get a look or a glimpse, or even a shadow, she's this mythical being and even by the end of the film it's still left up in the air about what's the cause of it all. That is more terrifying than anything they could've shown us on camera, that fear of the unknown and the possibility that something, or someone, other than the Blair Witch is to blame.

While the dialogue was improvised the film is surprisingly well written because it knows a key ingredient in the making of a horror movie. A mythology. During the interviews with the towns people we hear several stories about the history of The Blair Witch and it builds this image in our heads of who or what she is. We hear about a girl in the 1800s who disappeared for three days and came back talking of a woman who levitated off the ground. We hear from a survivor who claims the Blair Witch is covered head to toe in hair but is passed off as crazy by the townsfolk. We hear of a child murderer who butchered kids because the Witch was haunting him and told him the murder of kids would cause her to relent (brilliantly this story does come back in a subtle way near the end) and we even hear about Coffin Rock, a location where the ritualistically murdered bodied of five men were found only to disappear a few hours later, whether or not that had anything to do with the Blair Witch is unknown but it adds to the mythology of the place. By setting up these differing tales and town legends it adds credence to the possibility of the real Blair Witch and how she's affected this town.

For a film that was as big as The Blair Witch Project was and to an extent still is, the fact that time and knowledge have diluted how actually scary it is, is not surprising. However that doesn't make it a bad film, if you take it at face value and see it as the real story it's trying to be you get a well-crafted horror movie that utilises a found footage style to keep a lot of the film in the dark, an improvised and natural cast that slowly fell apart as the days went on and their hunger and exhaustion got the better of them and an original, simply told ghost story that, even so many years after its release, is still one of the most famous horror movies ever created.

Basic judgement is that it's a good horror movie and worth checking out, but it's lost that special something in the years since its release.

7.5/10