Review The Blair Witch Project

Horror is a genre of 2 halves, on the one hand you've got gore, to be horrified into fear at the sight of people being mutilated in ways you never imagined. On the other you've got tension, as Alfred Hitchcock once said 'There is no terror in the bang, just the aniticipation of it.' Both these approaches can be made to work, whether it be gore in something like the ingeniously brutal Texas Chainsaw Massacre or in terms of tension in the spine tingling Blair Witch Project.
This film was set just to be a quiet independant film, but as hype got ahead of it, it became huge and attracted the attention of disgruntled, purist critics who disliked the handheld camera work and lack of music. The truth of the matter is that this film in all it's realism is bone chilling. I'm always amazed how few people have actually bothered to go see it, because for me it's one of the scariest films ever made, next to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Alien, Ringu, The Birds, Psycho and Rear Window.
THe upshot is that 3 student filmmakers venture into a forest to shoot a documentary about the legend of the Blair Witch, the entire film is the footage from the camera which was found a year later. Very little is fully explained allowing the viewer to come to their own conclusions about whether the 3 kids are being played like a cello by the disgruntled townsfolk, going mental from deep paranoia or experiencing the supernatural, personnally I vote C. The whole beauty of this film is you never see anything, it's all the camera, but the way it's played out, one scene day, the next night is genius, especially considering most of the dialog is all improvised.
This is without a shadow of a doubt one of the best independant films ever produced, it utilises techinques totally new at the time to induce fear in the viewer, it's been copied in some senses since then, however the scary forest idea hasn't been properly touched since then, because filmmakers know they won't be able to match how scary Blair Witch really is, don't dare leave the teen years without seeing this masterpiece.