Found footage films are often known as the most terrifying in the horror genre, especially since the genre surged back in the 1990s. There was an abundance of films that kept pushing the genre further and further into the realms of realism, recording with worse cameras than ever before, and hiring actors without telling them the actual script of what they were supposed to do. However, no film took it as far as The Blair Witch Project, a project where the filmmakers genuinely aimed to traumatize their actors, not permanently though…
How to Download The Blair Witch Project
You can download the film from a digital store. You can also stream it. Click on the Download button at the end of this review and make your choice. If you like found footage films, check out also our review of Cloverfield.
The Blair Witch Project Review
The premise is as simple as it can be, the story depicts three student filmmakers who venture out into the woods in Maryland to investigate some of the Blair Witch related incidents. However, after a few days of exploring, they managed to lose their map and everything starts to go awry. The film depicts how an ominous presence begins to interrupt their lives in the forest, and how they begin to lose their minds and sense of self while being completely lost in the Maryland backwoods.
This movie probably had one of the best marketing strategies ever. They even listed the actors as “deceased” or “missing” while promoting this in film festivals. The reason people went to this movie is because of the ambiguity the trailer had. The actors weren’t well known and the horror wasn’t seen.
It was the fear factor of how you knew as much as the characters did about what was going on, and that is what made this film so effective at scaring the horror film fanaticism out of audiences.
The directors Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick played a lot of tricks on their actors during the filming period. They would leave them in the jungle for long periods of time, and then they would mess with them by making noises and recording all of that into the footage. This also brings a natural element, as the unknown actors seemed like real people, we’re genuinely scared of these ominous occurrences.
The horrible camera quality in this film is a way of increasing the atmosphere present here, which is done so with the use of many different forms of VHS cameras, rather than simple filters in editing. The authenticity of the horror here was truly something else, there was no soundtrack to this film, no music to release the tension or even increase it, and the performances and the sheer horror quality of the film do the talking.
The actors were terrified on set for this film, they were just as scared as us, perhaps even more and rightfully so! The method of acting here went so far that instead of using fictional names, every single one of the actors in the cast ended up using their real names for the film. Not to mention, what they shared here on the screen were completely their natural reactions, and some of the sequences which required acting from them were tremendously acted and performed by these brilliant actors.
Since there is no music in this film, the ambiance was set by noises of nature, birds chirping in the distance, tree branches falling and breaking as the characters walk, and the breathing and ominous noises that occurred at night time. The film uses this ambiance to create a sense of tension and intensity that horror films can seldom replicate.
The Verdict
The hype surrounding this film was gigantic, as it was dubbed one of the scariest films to ever be released. The film was shot on a $60,000 budget and managed to rake up 41 times more than that amount in the box office revenue.
There’s a reason why The Blair Witch Project has helmed as one of the scariest films of all time, and it truly lives up to that hype. Even by today’s standards, this is a film that cannot be compared to random commercial horror films. This was a film that was created to terrorize humans, and it works perfectly to do exactly that.
