Horror Month: The Blair Witch Project (1999)

                 I watched this one early on in Horror Month on purpose. The reason for this is that I wanted to get it out of the way because Blair Witch Project is horrifying, and one of the very, very few movies that continues to be scary after repeated viewings. I'm not really a fan of the "found footage" horror films that have become so popular over the last decade or so, they're pretty repetitive an uninspired (with a few exceptions of course). These types of movies certainly existed before Blair Witch, but this was the one masterfully made one that got very popular and influenced all the others. And since it came out, no found footage film and very few horror films in general have reached the levels of suspense, terror, and intensity that The Blair Witch Project achieves.

                I think that the extremely low budget of this film worked for it rather than against it. If the filmmakers had had a huge pile of cash to work with, they may have produced a more polished, technically intricate experience, maybe thrown in some expensive but unnecessary CGI or just thought too big in general. No, Blair Witch is brilliant in its simplicity, and that's one of the main reasons it's so great. The picture is grainy because it wasn't shot on professional cameras, there are no big name actors, and you literally see absolutely nothing of the film's eponymous monster in the entire movie. The two former work toward its staggeringly powerful realism and the latter is a main component of the scariness of Blair Witch. This film adheres to a rule that's simple in concept but can be very difficult to follow: The less you show of your monster, the scarier it becomes. And since you don't ever see the Blair Witch at all, she becomes absolutely horrifying. All of the scares in this movie come from your own imagination, when the characters are straining their eyes searching all around them for the source of the voices that torment them at night, you're transfixed on the screen, expecting to see a monster, a person, an animal, anything. But you don't. You're left confused, scared, and on the very edge of your seat. All we see of the Blair Witch is piles of rocks that appear around the students' tent at night, humanoid stick figures hanging from trees, strange symbols carved into the walls of that terrifying house they find at the end, and a bundle of sticks containing hair, skin and teeth of the first of her victim in the film (RIP Josh). It works so incredibly well because everything is in the viewer's imagination, and the more active that imagination is (mine works overtime 24 hours a day) the scarier it is. And above all, the way it's presented is just so....real. You feel like this really happened and the Blair Witch is really out there in the woods. 

                   That's a scary thought.