The Blair Witch Project (1999)

In 1993, while film students at The University of Central Florida, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez realized they each shared a common interest in documentaries on paranormal phenomena, finding them to be scarier than traditional horror films. So they put their heads together, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon-style, and conspired to craft a horror movie that combined the styles of both, writing a 35-page screenplay with dialogue intended to be improvised. In June, 1996, Sanchez and Myrick put out a casting call advertisement on Backstage magazine promoting a "completely improvised feature film" that would be shot in a "wooded location," asking for actors with strong improvisational abilities. Three young actors with minimal acting experience were selected: Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard. 

Principal photography commenced on October 23rd, 1997, and wrapped eight days later, on Halloween, of all days. The actors were given no lines, only a bare-bones outline of what they would be doing each day on set, with individual instructions granted to each to help them improvise the action, and clues as to their next location through messages hidden inside 35 mm film cans left in milk crates they found with Global Positioning Satellite systems. While cinematographer Neal Fredericks oversaw the project and supplied a CP-16 film camera, all of the footage shown in the film (save a single interview about a child murderer) was shot by the actors. 

All of this to say Myrick and Sanchez took a gargantuan risk with their cinematic undertaking, putting their faith in the hands of mainly three young actors who had never acted in or shot a movie before in their relatively short lives. Shot on an original budget of $35,000 to $60,000, The Blair Witch Project reached a final cost of $200,000 to $750,000 after post-production and marketing. And the marketing campaign was one of the most inventive, ambitious, and ultimately damaging in film history. To create the illusion that everything on screen was factual, Myrick and Sanchez created missing person posters for the trio of participants and claimed they were either missing or deceased. The end result, however, became one of the most successful independent motion pictures of all time, setting the standard for an entire subgenre of horror along the way.

While The Blair Witch Project may not have been the first entry in what is now referred to as the "found footage" subgenre -- that honor seems to belong to Cannibal Holocaust, unseen by this critic -- it is both the most successful commercially, earning over $140 million domestically and over $248 million worldwide, and the entry that popularized the economical, authentic format. The 2000s and 2010s saw a steep rise in found footage horror, boasting the longest running Paranormal Activity franchise (seven installments), Cloverfield, The Devil Inside, the most recently popular Creep franchise, and countless more. But it's more than safe to assume none of those movies would exist without the trailblazing success of Myrick and Sanchez' baby, which was made out of pure love and passion for the beauty of independent filmmaking and the boundless possibilities of cinematic horror.

What begins as a joyous excursion into the woods for three ambitious, first-time filmmakers eager to cut their teeth on their first official film endeavor insidiously descends into a traumatizing head-first plunge into the bowels of hell. 

A written introduction on a black screen ominously sets the tone for what we're about to be subjected to for the next 81 minutes, stating that in October, 1994, three student filmmakers traveled into the Black Hills forest near Burkittsville, Maryland to make a documentary and went missing. A year later, their footage was found, hence the title of the subgenre.

Heather is the creator and director of the titular Blair Witch Project, a documentary about the legend of a deceased witch in the quiet, small Maryland town of Burkittsville. Accompanied by her cameraman and close friend, Josh, and a stranger named Mike, who has agreed to handle the sound equipment, Heather leaves the comforts of her home for the weekend to travel to the alleged witch's hometown, where the trio intends to interview local residents about their knowledge of the legend before hiking into the Black Hills forest to see if they can uncover signs of her ghost that has supposedly been haunting the woods since her death. Throughout the journey, they interview people who allege to have had firsthand encounters with the Blair Witch, and learn about a man named Rustin Parr, a hermit who lived deep in the woods and murdered seven children on the witch's command. While their initial mood is one of excitement at producing their first movie, taking the creepy accounts of the locals with a cheeky grain of salt, the filmmakers begin to rethink the frivolity and harmlessness of their endeavor once they become lost in the Black Hills forest, despite having a map and GPS device at their disposal. Even more threatening, they come to realize they may not be alone in these woods, as strange noises manifest in the night, piles of rocks appear outside their tent in the morning, and humanoid stick figures await them the deeper they stroll.

The best horror movies tend to thrive on the simplest of premises. Halloween, before introducing convoluted cults and brother-sister rivalries to the Michael Myers mythology, started as a cozy holiday tale about a mental patient who escapes from the asylum to which he's been confined for the last 15 years and returns to his hometown to stalk and kill three high school babysitters on Halloween night. The original Friday the 13th took a large group of young adult camp counselors, placed them in an isolated campsite setting, and over the course of a single Friday night unleashed upon them a vengeful mama bear intent on avenging the drowning of her 11-year-old son. And of course, the slasher that paved the way for those two classics, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which sent a small group of friends driving to the childhood home of the protagonist and her brother in Texas to ensure their grandfather's grave hasn't been desecrated. By the end of the night, four fifths of the teens have been captured, impaled on meat hooks, bludgeoned with a sledgehammer, and mutilated with a chainsaw by a family of inbred, cannibalistic sadists, led by a hulking, mute, mentally challenged man-child with a fetish for wearing the faces of his victims. In terms of crafting a creative, balls-to-the-wall insane horror extravaganza working with a miniscule budget, few can beat that last mention.

However, while The Blair Witch Project abstains from the physical violence and jaw-dropping bloodshed and makeup effects that characterize those aforementioned titles, what distinguishes Myrick and Sanchez' visionary masterwork are the ingenious ways in which they make their supernatural horror story come across as (mostly) plausible and grounded in reality. Texas Chainsaw accomplished a similar goal over 20 years earlier, presenting its depraved horror story with an almost documentarian air and authenticity, a literal nightmare transferred to celluloid. But by the final act, when it introduced the grandfather of the Sawyer family, a decrepit, corpse-like man who reveals his aliveness by sucking on the blood of his latest would-be human meal, it's clear this is not a true story, but rather a gonzo Gothic nightmare cranked up to 11. Myrick and Sanchez never take that leap into overt surrealism, training and maintaining their intimate focus on the gradually deteriorating psyches of their three protagonists, all while keeping the source of their horror fairly ambiguous and psychologically driven. Which brings me to the most remarkable (and probably controversial) decision on the filmmakers' part: the titular Blair Witch is never once displayed onscreen. Not for even a second. (If you'd like just a taste of her spindly appearance, check out the 2016 sequel, simply titled Blair Witch, by Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard.)

Rather than offering so much as a glimpse of their titular creation, Myrick and Sanchez implant an idea of her, accompanied by a pervasive sensation of spine-tingling apprehension, through documentary interviews from the locals of her hometown. Some of these people are actual residents while others are planted actors, unknown by the primary cast. At the start of The Blair Witch Project, Heather, Mike, and Josh travel through the town interviewing the residents about the Blair witch. One waitress barely has a clue, the name triggering only the memory of her older sister's high school. An old man insists he doesn't believe in witchcraft. In one of the film's few instances of lighthearted humor, Heather asks, "Are you a religious man?" to which he tersely replies, "Yep." "Alrighty." However, one woman holding her baby daughter recounts the story of some folks who went into the woods and were never seen again. As she tries to tell the story, her daughter suspiciously keeps putting her hand over her mom's mouth. Swatting her hand away, the woman finishes her story, and her daughter begins crying, "No! No!" This subtly plays on the notion that children, like pets, possess a greater awareness of what we would consider supernatural hokum. A young man claims his grandmother would use the Blair witch to frighten him and his siblings into going to bed on time, lest they be taken away. In this peaceful little community, the Blair Witch seems to be the local boogey(wo)man, a cautionary tale exploited to keep children in line. For the most part, these interviews feed into the documentarian verisimilitude that Myrick and Sanchez are striving for, creating the atmosphere for the film and establishing context for the fictitious filmmakers' project. 

They begin to take on a more unsettling undercurrent down the line, however, when the legend of Rustin Parr is revealed. A hermit living deep in the Black Hills, Parr one day walked into a supermarket announcing that his work was finished. At first, no one understood what he was babbling on about. When police came to his home, they discovered the corpses of seven children. In his courtroom testimony, Parr confessed to abducting the kids, bringing them down into his basement in pairs of two, forcing one to face the wall while he murdered the other, before killing the second half. His reason for making one kid face the wall was because he could "feel" their eyes watching him as he murdered the other child, and couldn't stand it. This legendary story of a child murderer and his modus operandi is absolutely terrifying, preying on every parent's worst nightmare. It establishes a compelling lore for the Blair Witch (as it can be inferred Parr was acting solely on her demands), and I love how Myrick and Sanchez do so in the most efficient manner possible, allowing everyday people to divulge fragments of information to the camera in a manner that feels authentic, unforced, and unscripted (because it wasn't). Adhering firmly to their found footage concept, the filmmakers resist the urge to create flashbacks to Parr's murders, letting the local residents tell his story directly as if it were well-known history in their small town, without spoon-feeding the audience as a more conventional horror film might. 

As sickening and violent as Rustin Parr's backstory is, the creepiest scene during the technically innocuous setup is the interview of Mary Brown (an effortlessly frightening-looking Patricia DeCou), a delusional elderly woman who alleges to have encountered the Blair Witch in her childhood. Once again, the horrifying picture of the witch and the horror she's unleashed are left to the imagination of the viewer, who's required to listen to the speaker's improvised account and paint a portrait in their mind using the information that's spoken. It's a genius tactic for instilling fear in your audience without having to film an entire flashback sequence or even write a traditional script with preplanned dialogue. With her dark skin tone, skeletal face, sunken eyes, ratty hair, and raspy voice, a bible clutched in her hands, DeCou subverts the freakishness of her appearance with a soft-spoken, communicative demeanor as she recounts a spooky story from childhood. While fishing with her dad in the Black Hills, Mary was lying on the ground, looking up at the sky. All of a sudden, she felt the eerie sensation of a presence nearby, and a woman wearing a wool shawl materialized. She didn't say anything, but her appearance spoke of someone straight out of a nightmare, with hair all over her hands and arms. When she removed her shawl, fur was displayed from her chest down to her legs. "Hairy from head to toe," as Heather gathers. (Is it possible this "witch" was actually Patricia Krenwinkel from the Charles Manson family?) While I'm tempted to say the writing in this introductory segment is brilliant, building a mood of gulp-inducing dread through verbal storytelling, there essentially is none. Myrick and Sanchez may have written an outline of what the extras would talk about to the camera, but at the end of the day, these non-actors chose their own words on the spot, and they were perfectly atmospheric and natural in both their line choices and deliveries.

Another short, eerie anecdote is one of a young girl named Robin Weaver, who disappeared in the woods one day, only to return three days later. Upon returning, she spoke of a woman whose feet never touched the ground. These stories succinctly suffuse the opening portion of The Blair Witch Project with the riveting, elemental chill of a campfire horror story. In the process, they fill our protagonists' minds with a rich tapestry of their subject's background and abilities, all the better to feed their ratcheting paranoia and nervousness once they find themselves lost, cold, hungry, and haunted in the supposedly haunted woods. 

Filming The Blair Witch Project in October was a poetic choice. I can't imagine this movie having been filmed at any other time or season of the year. It would almost be like Steven Spielberg choosing to shoot Jaws in the winter. It just wouldn't work. In this movie, you can feel the cool, autumn air blowing through your bones. You can hear the crunch of the leaves strewn all over the ground as the characters traverse them. The peaceful, calming swoosh of the water streaming in the river as they carefully walk across the log to reach the other side. Encompassing them from every corner are tall, bare trees, signifying the natural beauty and the unlimited mysteries of the forest. Captured in black and white, the sun shines into their CP-16 film camera. The actors accurately capture the serenity and eeriness simultaneously inherent in one the most classic and unendingly petrifying settings of horror. What's all the more impressive is that almost every second of footage from start to finish is shot by the three actors themselves. Leonard, in particular, was cast for his knowledge on how to operate a camera, while Donahue had to undergo a two-day crash course. Evidently two days was all it took to produce the down-to-earth, documentarian aesthetic that makes The Blair Witch Project feel so uniquely real. 

From the opening shot of Heather giving her introduction in her home to the final one set in Rustin Parr's abandoned house, everything we see is captured in a handheld, documentary format without the comfort of conventional cinematic cinematography. This visual technique has an immediacy that immerses us thoroughly into the experiences of the protagonists. Our sight and sound are limited to theirs. We're never made privy to information that they're not. When the trio sets off in the woods, the camera quivers in conjunction with their footsteps. When they run for their lives in the nighttime, it shakes vigorously like we're in the middle of an earthquake. The beauty of the camerawork is that it's entirely authentic without ever becoming incoherent. As shaky as it occasionally is, out of necessity to faithfully capture the chaos of an unfathomable attack, we can always see what's happening and where the characters are. (To be fair, it's fairly easy: there are only three characters in one setting.) In other words, whatever we see, the directors want us to see. Anything we can't see is not meant to be seen. Sensitive viewers may experience intense nausea during the more shaky moments. Fortunately, I'm not, nor was I ever, one of those people. Certain scenes, like the interviews of the town locals, are filmed in black and white, while the nighttime scenes, where the trio is terrorized in their tent, are often presented in pitch black. A considerable degree of patience is required in these moments, as the directors create tension by keeping the camera turned off, as it would be when you're sleeping, thus bathing the screen in total blackness. Our only sense being catered to is our hearing, as strange, almost indiscernible sounds keep our filmmakers awake from outside. In the morning, they come across bizarre objects that hint at the witch's presence: three piles of rocks arranged outside their tent, and a series of humanoid stick figures tied in a cross on trees. Donahue zeroes in on these details for her documentary as well as our ability to linger on them and soak in their irrational implications. The most gruesome uncovering of imagery is when she finds the remains of one of her coworkers wrapped in the fabric of his shirt, tied around a bundle of sticks. While the specifics are intentionally left a bit obscured, the blood is beyond obvious, the bloody body part could possibly be a tongue, and the teeth were actually obtained from a Maryland dentist. Not since the first Texas Chainsaw has the commitment to practical effects been this practical. 

No musical score is composed for The Blair Witch Project. Owing to the filmmakers' strict dedication to their pseudo-documentary format, they refuse to overdramatize any plot development with suspenseful or dramatic incidental music, relying instead on ambient sounds of nature and the supernatural. At night, while the trio is in their tent, as we stare at a black screen for an almost maddening amount of time, we must strain our ears to just barely hear the faint crackling of what sounds like sticks being torn apart. As our protagonists listen carefully in petrified dread, we hear the sound of a baby crying and children laughing. Perhaps the seven victims of Rustin Parr? The clearest sound is the panicked, heavy breathing of Heather, while Mike and Josh whisper to each other to be quiet. This excruciatingly tense and suspenseful moment reinforces our innate fear of the dark before paying off with the scariest scene in the movie. 

Inspired by producer Gregg Hale's memories of military training, in which "enemy soldiers" would hunt a trainee through wild terrain for three days, Sanchez and Myrick obtained genuine terror from their actors by shaking their tent at a likely random moment, forcing them to run as fast as humanly possible through the woods in the dead of night. While Heather is running, trying not to trip over her unlaced boots, she screams at the top of her lungs, "Oh my God, what the fuck is that? What the fuck is that?" Commendably, the directors don't treat us to the glimpse of whatever "that" is, making the moment even scarier by allowing our mind to fill in the blanks. Anything we come up with is bound to be scarier than anything they could show onscreen. Interestingly, it turns out the directors didn't leave their star with nothing to look at. The horrifying sight was of art director Ricardo Moreno, who wore white long-johns, white stockings, and white pantyhose pulled over his head. As effective as this sequence is without that image, I would love to see even a still picture of Moreno in that outfit, standing idly in the pitch-black woods. 

After spending the night in the woods, the trio returns to their tent at daylight, and to Josh's immense frustration and confusion, his belongings, and his alone, are scattered all over. Looking at his bag, initially he thinks some water is on it. Upon closer inspection, he and Mike identify the substance as slime. Even with a brief close-up, it's tough to make out that it's actually slime, but the point is made clear: Josh has been marked.

The most notable achievement of The Blair Witch Project is the trio of immersive, emotionally raw performances at the center. Without the typical benefit of scripted dialogue, Heather Donahue, Mike Williams, and Josh Leonard arrived to the project knowing only that this film would be entirely improvised and filmed almost entirely in a forest. The single requirement demanded by Myrick and Sanchez was that whoever signs on to audition come equipped with strong improvisational abilities. These two hotshots hit the jackpot casting this trio, especially Heather. It's one thing for the extras in the introductory scenes to improvise a few lines of expository dialogue based on an outline, but for three inexperienced actors to improvise their way through an entire 81-minute movie is a whole other thing entirely. If the roles had been filled by three much less assured performers, the results likely would have been disastrous. To my astonishment, Donahue, Williams, and Leonard rise to the unorthodox occasion. Essentially, they're playing versions of their actual selves, even keeping their names (something Donahue admitted in 2014 she regretted, as it cost her future roles in the film industry). In most films, character development is crafted on the page, then brought to life in front of the camera by the actors and their director. Such is not the case here, because these actors aren't even given dialogue to flesh out their characters. Instead, Heather, Mike, and Josh appear onscreen sporting what I imagine are their everyday personalities, and they develop them in response to the story's increasingly irrational developments. 

At the second the screen cuts from black to color, the first face we see is a close-up of Heather's, and she brings a load of personality to the project. Based on her smile and free-spirited body language, we gather this is a bubbly, good-natured person and a pleasure to spend the next 81 minutes with. At the beginning of her titular project, Heather presents as a self-assured, vivacious, optimistic young woman chomping at the bit to begin her first adventure into the world of documentary filmmaking. While never stated, it can be inferred she's a college film student much like her actual directors were four years earlier. When she's filling out the initial scenes of her doc, Heather is bursting with the almost irrepressible joy and excitement of a filmmaker commencing work on their first ever assignment. During moments of downtime, like when the three are relaxing in a hotel at the end of their first day of shooting, she isn't afraid to let loose, make some goofy facial expressions, and enjoy a swig of beer. Once they begin their excursion into the damp, never-ending woods, Heather remains confident almost to the point of cockiness, insisting that she knows exactly where they're going, insisting they keep moving south, insisting they're not lost. She clings to the real-world logic that "it's difficult to get lost nowadays, and it's even harder to stay lost, so we have that on our side." As time goes on, however, and the trio fail to make it back to their car, and the directions on their map seem to be at variance with where they actually are, Heather begins to gradually lose that assuredness, and watching her face transition from an exuberant smile to an expression of pure disorientation, remorse, self-doubt, and humiliation is utterly heart-wrenching. She feels responsible for bringing Mike and Josh into these woods, and can no longer assure them of her ability to lead them out. At first her misery is conveyed in blank stares, hiding her shame behind a hand and wiping the snot beginning to drip from her nose. After learning of a betrayal from one of her confidantes, Heather obliterates the perky, headstrong director she begins as, dissolving into a hysterical, shouting, whimpering train wreck. It's a wonder how she didn't lose her voice from all the ear-piercing screaming she's forced to do, whether screaming obscenities or for a friend who's gone missing overnight. 

Two of Heathers most devastating moments occur in close-up, one in the daytime, the other at night. The first is when Josh aims the camera at her disgusted face, shaming her for getting them lost, and sarcastically asking her to give a reaction. Initially angry and vulgar, Heather turns her head from the camera, struggling to maintain her composure and withhold her tears, but as Josh begins to scream at her, she breaks down and begs him in the most achingly moving, almost childlike whimper to stop. When he criticizes her decision to continue filming, she screamingly confesses, "It's all I fucking have left, okay?" offering quick insight into her motivation as an aspiring filmmaker. The second standout moment is without doubt the most iconic set piece of The Blair Witch Project, so much so that it's used as the cover for the VHS. It's a simple yet emotionally demanding apology from Heather to the families of herself and her coworkers. Late at night, while Mike is sleeping, Heather sneaks out into the woods and, with the camera zoomed in for an extreme close-up of her face, records herself giving a whispered, sincere apology. She accepts full responsibility for their predicament (even though the bulk of the blame belongs to the unseen witch), asserts her love for her parents, and owns up to her naivete as tears pour like raindrops from her eyes almost as quickly as the snot cascades from her nostrils. Throughout her apology, Heather turns her head in response to perceived noises and poignantly states, "I'm scared to close my eyes. I'm scared to open them." She hyperventilates, palpably expressing her nerve-jangled terror and desperation before whispering her final, heart-shattering pronouncement: "I'm gonna die out here." It's a moment of breathtaking vulnerability and self-reflection, set against a backdrop of darkness-fueled horror. 

It's sickeningly unfortunate and mind-boggling that this stellar, emotionally gutting display of acting came at the expense of future employment. Heather even went as far as to legally change her name in 2020 to disassociate herself from what should have been a star-making role. I don't know if it's because she "dared" to star in a low-budget supernatural horror film, or because the promotional campaign (which was executed without her input) convinced people she was missing or dead. (After the release of the movie, Heather's mom received condolence letters.) But now that 25 years have passed and we're all aware The Blair Witch Project was just a movie made by two independent filmmakers with vivid imaginations, it's time we judge Heather on the undebatable quality of her lead performance and admit to her status as one of the great underrated scream queens of horror. For her mix of cheerfulness, confidence, determination, ferocity, and vulnerability, she deserves to be placed in the final girl hall of fame alongside Jamie Lee Curtis, Adrienne King, Heather Langenkamp, Marilyn Burns, and Liv Tyler.

Ironically enough, similar to how Johnny Depp somehow attained superstardom after making an adequate contribution in A Nightmare on Elm Street while the infinitely superior Heather Langenkamp quickly faded into obscurity, Josh Leonard has gone on to enjoy a moderately successful acting career following the release of Blair Witch. While Heather struggled to find work in the acting department, found it necessary to change her name to "Rei Hance," and changed her career to growing medical marijuana, Leonard has been appearing now and again in horror movies. His best role post-Blair Witch to date is David Strine, the obsessive stalker/murderer of Steven Soderbergh's psychological horror, Unsane. Playing himself in his feature film debut, Leonard begins the proceedings as the most cool, calm, and collected member of the bunch. He has the cool personality of a stoner, someone who's always surrounded by a cloud of smoke and telling everyone around him, "It's cool, man. It's all good." True to form, he has a scruffy beard and wears his long hair in a ponytail, and combined with his skinny build, he's absolutely unrecognizable as the chubby, effeminate-sounding, full-bearded psychopath of Unsane in Dahmer glasses. Once it becomes apparent Heather may not be the all-knowing leader she posed as, it's Josh who tries to maintain the peace between the three of them, in stark contrast to the far more hot-headed Mike. But as days turn to nights, food supply grows scarce, and their car fails to materialize, Josh develops into the bitterest and most vindictive of them all, placing the blame squarely at the feet of his director. In quiet moments to himself, away from the camera, his macho exterior subsides, replaced by concealed tears of frustration and despair. 

Mike is the most timid and rational of the trio, sort of the Vern Tessio, if you will. When the supernatural activity first begins in the night, Mike is the one who refuses to leave the minimal comforts of his tent, claiming he didn't hear anything. Now that I think about it, he most closely resembles the audience surrogate. Once he realizes Heather doesn't know where she's taking them, Mike reacts with the most resentment and concern, bitterly insisting they're "not camping here," demanding she take them home, and openly admitting he doesn't fully trust her. As tensions mount among the group and a feeling of hopelessness sets in, Mike becomes extremely quick-tempered and impulsive, screaming at the top of his lungs for help to the sky, laughing in an almost deranged frustration, talking aloud to the empty forest. In his most irrational and selfish state, he steals the map from Heather's pants pocket while she's asleep and kicks it to the creek, standing silently by while Josh chastises Heather for her supposed irresponsibility. As he and Josh laugh at Heather after her boots get soaked, enjoying a rare moment of humor amid the annoyance, Mike mindlessly blurts out the truth of his map-snatching, finding it so funny that he has to suppress his laughter to relay it. Characters making foolish and mean-spirited decisions like this in a horror movie is a total cliche, but what makes Mike's action slightly different and more understandable, though not to say excusable, is that we identify with his loss of composure, the feeling of hopelessness that drove him to commit it. And in the end, we come to realize he was right after all: the map was useless because all three of them are under the spell of a supernatural being. If he hadn't thrown away the map, their outcome would've been no different. Once Josh begins to lose his patience with Heather, Mike develops a greater sense of compassion, defending Heather when Josh harasses her with her camera, and pleading with them to put an end to the fighting. In one of the few instances of dark humor, Mike, starving and despairing but too exhausted to express it anymore, sits in front of a tree and blankly chews on a dry leaf, to the amusement of Heather. 

Together, these three actors establish an organic, at times contentious, and almost familial rapport. The constant arguing makes for compelling drama because it's grounded in honest human frustration. As backhanded a compliment as this may sound, part of what makes the leads' performances so immersive and believable is their God-given appearances. None of them look like your average glamorous Hollywood stars. Instead, they look like regular, everyday people we could imagine seeing on the street. And that, combined with the fact that they had never appeared in a film prior to The Blair Witch Project, increases the verisimilitude exponentially. The dialogue they improvise on the spot always sounds natural and conveys the personalities of their characters. Until I learned not one line had been conceived in the script, I had no idea the actors came up with their own, using only the clues they were given each day as to what would be happening. My favorite exchanges are the ones that evoke my secondary passion in life after film criticism: food. One night, while Heather and Mike are sitting at a campfire, they fantasize about pumpkin pie and warm, melty ice cream. Their longing is so palpable you can visualize the dessert in detail. Josh expresses his yearning for his mom's mashed potatoes. Mike just wants a single meatball with some red wine. It's within these quiet, brief conversations where the characters put aside their anger and reflect on the little things they miss the most in their home lives. When Mike asks Heather what her favorite Sunday activity was, she dryly states that it used to be hiking in the woods. At this point, the characters' desperation has descended into a state of resignation, and they will utilize any opportunity they can find to insert some humor. At the start of the journey, the actors incorporate silly humor into their dialogue more frequently. Heather observes the inconsistent hair patterns on Mike's chest, Josh warns his companions about his uncontrollable nighttime flatulence in the tent, and the trio compare themselves to characters from Gilligan's Island. 

While filming The Blair Witch Project only took eight days, the editing process for Myrick and Sanchez exceeded eight months. After acquiring 20 hours of raw footage, the filmmakers trimmed their movie to a slim 81 minutes, but make no mistake: this is not an easy, breezy fun time in the woods. Myrick and Sanchez move their story at a slow but emotionally purposeful pace, lingering on their characters' despair and immersing us thoroughly in their gradually deteriorating psyches without ever being too eager to cut away. There are multiple scenes of Heather, Josh, and Mike walking aimlessly through the forest, but that's the point. It never feels protracted or sluggish because they're walking toward a clear, relatable objective: to find their car and go home. Because they're under the influence of the witch, they can't find their way out, so all they can do is walk on in the daytime and set up camp by nightfall. Myrick and Sanchez use that repetition to their advantage, ensuring that we experience every drop of irritation, fatigue, and hunger that all this excessive walking is stirring within their characters. During the nighttime attacks, while the camera is off, the directors hold on the black screen for an almost excruciating amount of time as strange noises play off-screen. It's the equivalent of stranding us in the dark, where we can't see anything, but our sense of hearing is strengthened, so every little sound, whether it's the ambient snapping of branches or the agonizing screams of Josh in the distance, amplifies and adopts a menacing possibility. 

Apart from the inherently frightening wooded location, the second most terrifying setting in The Blair Witch Project is the dilapidated, abandoned home of child murderer Rustin Parr, which makes its haunting appearance in the final climactic portion. In actuality, it's the historic 150-year-old building called the Griggs House. In the context of this movie, it's the ideal home for Satan. Nestled deep within the Black Hills forest, the Parr home's colorless, old-fashioned exterior belies the repulsive, run-down nature of its interior. The walls are covered with holes. The wallpaper is sporadically ripped, revealing planks of wood behind it. The most nightmarish detail is a series of black, child handprints painted all over the walls at the top of the stairs. The only moderately comforting feature is a brick fireplace jamb. Myrick and Sanchez utilize this final setting to prey on our fear of haunted houses, milking it for every ounce of spine-chilling suspense. 

The ending is one of the most bizarre, abrupt, and traumatizing in the annals of horror history. What makes it so horrifying isn't just what happens but what it implies based on verbal lore delivery from the beginning. Myrick and Sanchez are as creative and resourceful as the best low-budget genre filmmakers, exploiting the commonplace objects at their disposal -- sticks, rocks, a run-down wooded house -- to produce a taut, straightforward exercise in elemental horror that emphasizes psychological tension, human fallibility, and patient suspense building over boatloads of gore and special effects. The Blair Witch Project reinforces the rule that when it comes to delivering an effective horror story, less can often result in much more. An isolated, wooded location, a small crew of dedicated actors who exhibit a natural chemistry, practical sound effects, and a creepy, abandoned house for good measure. What else could you possibly need? 

8.2/10