Word: witches
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Blair Witch Project is designed to keep us from saying that so easily. The premise is that three student filmmakers are producing a documentary investigating the ghost stories of a small town. The movie begins by explaining that their footage has been recovered since their disappearance a year ago. The rest of the movie shows the filmmakers at work. The movie is entirely shot in grainy video and 16mm film, often in bad light or with bad sound, through jerky, rushed shots. There's no score and no opening credits. On the one hand, this makes it plausible that...
That's not to say that The Blair Witch Project isn't deeply creepy. While most horror movies build to only a few terrifying moments, The Blair Witch Project manages to sustain tension for minutes on end. By the end of the movie, even the pastoral daytime scenes are uneasy, and they get shorter and shorter, while the night scenes feel nerve-wrackingly long. Also, the scary things in most horror movies are outlandish and laughable. Scream makes a virtue of this, winking at every silly cliche of the genre. But Blair Witch invests ordinary things--piles of rocks, bundles...
Some horrifying images stick in your mind forever. That shower attack at the Bates Motel. Zombies storming a farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead. Leathermask's rampage in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Add to the list: the final confession in The Blair Witch Project, in which a petrified young filmmaker delivers her last will and testament on video while awaiting imminent doom. Improvised by newcomer Heather Donahue, the spine-tingling scene is guaranteed to provide nightmares for years to come...
...Philadelphia native whose only previous high-profile role was in a TV spot for Psychic Friends Network ("Ten minutes free! We're totally stoked!"), Donahue, 24, tried out for Blair Witch after answering an ad in the trade paper Backstage. She filmed the mock-documentary with her male co-stars while the real movie's directors stayed out of camera range and passed along notes to the cast. "It was an actor's dream," sighs Donahue...
With the film's sensational response at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the actress changed her look from frumpy slacker to sleek ingenue and has been on a whirlwind of studio meetings. Strangers have stopped her to say they've seen bootlegged Blair Witch tapes or downloaded the entire film from the Internet. Still, Donahue is no rich witch. Her star may be rising, but she has a $1,000 car, lives in a seedy Hollywood neighborhood and is reluctant to accept just any new acting job: "I'm definitely not looking to do another horror film...