Yep... another found footage horror movie at Inlikeflynn's Corner! Yay!
This one is little bit different for me though, the hype for the movie was in 1999 (the year in witch it came out) and I was around 5 years old when people talked about this movie like it was the scariest movie of all time.
Me being a little boy, avoided this movie like the plague for being a little scaredy cat with horror movies back then... even many of my classmates talked about the movie in class, it really was a huge phenomenon back then (some people even actually believed the movie was real life). Years passed and I still didn't watched it mostly out of fear...
The story fallows 3 film students lost in the woods and being hunted by someone or something; that's pretty much it... The entire movie is shoot like a homemade movie and that helped to bring home the fact that it is "real" and that it "actually happened", the movie had little than a small budget indeed and I think that holds more water when you see it's three kids with a camera and shooting a documentary helping to bring home the scares. The bulk of the film is just this kids lost in the forest for what seems like almost a week with hauntings while they try to leave the forest.
The reception towards the movie seems to be very split, some consider it one of the scariest movies of all time while others consider it a mess of a movie where you can't tell at all what is happening, but to the films credit, the movie makers didn't had the budget to make a big epic scary fest... could they have made a true scary masterpiece? I don't know but regardless, the movie turned out pretty good if you ask me! While I don't find the movie scary in the slightest it is a very interesting film for what it is and how it was made with it's limited budget: I like how we never see the Blair Witch at all through the whole movie thus leaving us, has viewers, to imagine how this "ghost" or whatever looks, even though there are descriptions about how she looks at the beginning of the film it paints a picture in your mind that stays there until the rolling credits.
Now... how does the fear factor stacks up? it's not scary at all (at least to me), I will say though that I like how the movie subtly let's the tension be built around the situations that the main characters are in instead of relying on cheap jump scares with no build up or good real pay off.
Many horror movies rely on the anticipation of fear rather than the actual scare, some movies do this right others not so much, I feel like Blair Witch Project at least treats the viewer with a certain level of respect... witch is more than what I can say from many other horror movies that play it super safe and fallow an strict pattern of dumb.
Blair Witch Project is fun, and is made even more evident by the way it was portrayed to the audiences, being a success in all frontiers (with critics and at the box office) plus all the inspirations it gave to movies like Paranormal Activity and Grave Encounters... I wish the movie was truly more scary that what it is but it's still a fun movie to watch in a dark night... alone.
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