#9 The Blair Witch Project

We (the participants of the 60 Days of Horror) have talked about watching this flick every year, but for some reason we never did. I haven't seen this flick in its entirety since I saw it in the theater in 1999. It scared the bujezzus out of me then. Then, after the movie, as a bonus, I got to see a guy throw up from motion sickness caused by the film.

It's the original. The grandaddy of all found footage movies. And it still gets the job done. I'm glad that I decided to watch it tonight, alone in the dark, on the big TV with the sound cranked. The fact that I am sick right now and may also have a fever probably helped me to get into the experience as well.

I think that the effect of the flick is lost a little bit when it's lo-budget scope is shrunk down for the small screen. The thing that made this movie so effective when it came out was that people were so used to seeing the creature. The subtleties of using the audience's imagination against them had all but disappeared from films in the nineties (now such a technique would be totally unthinkable). But this movie used that as a weapon against its audience. We were glued to every movement and every sound, waiting for the damn thing to pay off. And while we were waiting, we imagined what the witch would look like, we put ourselves in the character's places, we built real, palpable anticipation and worry for these b-movie people. I can't imagine what it would be like to watch this bad boy on some tiny screen with crappy sound, because the thing that made it so intense was that you felt like you shouldn't blink. You might have missed something. Your ears had to be alert in order to catch all the bangs and clacks and screams emanating from the woods.

The fact that we NEVER see the villain or find out what happened to our heroes makes it even more frustrating and satisfying at the same time. We get to take the horror home with us, to be discussed and evaluated.

This flick was truly a product of its time. It couldn't be duplicated now because part of its effectiveness was the ad campaign. Many filmgoers went into the thing thinking that it might be real. So effective was the initial ad campaign, with commercials, fake websites and news articles, that we didn't quite know what to believe, except that we were seeing something new and different in the world of horror. This baby took us back to our roots. It helped a generation of desensitized horror fans remember why we enjoyed these movies in the first place.