October Horror 2011: Day 16 - The Blair Witch Project

The second entry in Found Footage week is 1999's smash hit The Blair Witch project.  Found footage movies had been in the periphery of the genre for years, perhaps one of the earliest examples was 1980's Cannibal Holocaust.  However, Blair Witch managed to bring it into the mainstream of the horror genre through an innovative internet marketing campaign which attempted to provide validity to the assertion that the recovered film was legitimate.  Even though the Blair Witch franchise attempt failed utterly with the sublimely terrible Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, the success of The Blair Witch Project enabled later films like Cloverfield, Quarantine, Paranormal Activity, and Grave Encounters.

Blair Witch has quite a reputation surrounding it, unfortunately I just don't think it's deserved.  For something that's supposed to be real footage some of the actions of the characters seem utterly contrived and I just can't imagine a real person doing something like that.

The majority of the film's running time is spent trekking through the woods and arguing with each other, which grated on my nerves so much that by the time actually scary things started happening I just didn't care.  Further, the build up to the climax is scarier than the actual close.  The tent shaking scene in particular is pretty tense.

They open a lot of things that they never really answer, but I suppose that was create an air of mystery...but that sort of thing is silly in the movie itself.  You've already convinced people to watch it, just resolve things for them.  The unknown fate of one of the characters may have been alluding to a continuation of the story in the sequel, but then they made a sequel that didn't pick up that plot thread at all.

If the movie had a stronger ending I might accept its flaws, but the end is just such a let down it seems more silly than scary.  Maybe if I didn't have such a strong disbelief from so many years on the internet, or if I'd had the immersion of a theater, I would think better of the ending.

Anyway, next up is the original found footage: Cannibal Holocaust.