The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Directed by Daniel Myrick
In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.
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14 films that influenced The Blair Witch Project
What critics say influenced The Blair Witch Project
Their fright no doubt passed with the film's second screening, and certainly with the popularity of Georges Méliès's pioneering special-effects fantasy A Trip to the Moon a few years later.
In a brilliant and original update of a traditional horror device, the “found” diary – it’s the form Bram Stoker used when he wrote “Dracula” – the movie purports to be an edited version of film and tape recordings discovered in the Maryland woods after a documentary team disappeared there in 1994.
Like the original version of The Haunting and Peter Weir's Picnic At Hanging Rock, Sanchez and Myrick's film knows that what's not seen frightens more easily that what is, and that the imagination's thoughts of what might have happened generally horrify on a deeper level than knowing what did.
Imagine a collaboration between George "Night of the Living Dead" Romero and the makers of "The Real World."
When compared to the recent cult horror flick The Blair Witch Project, Romero's original film wins out big time.
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DESPITE the absence of scary music, sudden jolts and flashing knives, “The Blair Witch Project” may be the creepiest and most original horror film since John Carpenter’s classic “Halloween.”
I mean, the original Halloween was a great film, a true original -- but once Hollywood started 'sequelizing' it and all the stuff Carpenter came up with for the first time became a formula, it got killed with repetition."
This horror classic was the highest grossing independent film of all time (and rightfully so) until The Blair Witch Project took the title twenty years later.
Las esquirlas de aquel suceso junto con la revitalización del género que encabezó The Blair Witch Project (1999) con su reformulación del plano subjetivo como aspecto formal central, fueron los catalizadores de la continuación más odiada por los críticos, Haloween: Resurection (2002).
"The Blair Witch Project" is a pseudo-documentary, but throw out any preconceptions borne of movies like "This Is Spinal Tap" and "Waiting for Guffman."
Communicating with the woodsy outdoors will be seriously out of the question once you've experienced the most frightening film to come along since "The Exorcist."
The film is a redefining moment in the horror genre, the first since "The Exorcist" that has generated enough courage to challenge what we regard as 'terrifying.'
As in Jonathan Mostow's intriguing Breakdown from 1997, The Blair Witch Project savvily exposes prejudice as another form of fear.
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Most of them are trying to cash in on Scream, like the stupid teen slasher movies like Idle Hands and The Rage: Carrie 2. But occasionally there comes a piece of inspired work like The Sixth Sense or The Blair Witch Project.
As with Psycho and (I would attest) The Blair Witch Project, Jaws has induced a collective fear arguably more known than the film itself.