Word: witchingly
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...good or bad that as viewers come out of a horror movie, they can't decide exactly what happens in the final shot (hint: recall what the witch made the kids do) and who the villain is (one guess: the missing filmmaker)? We'll say good, that ambiguity can coexist with atrocity. The film also plays upon the horror genre's attraction-repulsion for the filmgoer: what-happens-next? vs. why-am-I-watching-this? It makes canny use of dramatic longueurs. It's scary even when nothing happens, because something awful might, and, eek!, right now! Anticipation...
...legend's potency and overestimated their own skills in camping and coping. Within a day or two, they are lost and sawing on one another's frayed nerves. At night, huddled in their tent, they begin to suspect menace from someone or something outside. Could it be the Blair Witch? They hear noises, feel a rattling of the tent, find three small cairns and twigs bundled in an ominous symbol and, one morning, notice slime all over Josh's backpack. One of the three disappears. The remaining two finally come upon the witch's house, and there...
...original idea was to surround this story of three kids, lost and grumpy in the woods, with other pseudodocumentary filler: archival material on the witch legend, interviews with local police officers and friends of the missing students, all tied together by a suitably questing narrator. The trope is familiar enough, both from that oxymoronic phrase "reality TV" and from fake-umentary murder movies, such as the 1979 Cannibal Holocaust and the current Drop Dead Gorgeous. The Last Broadcast, a slick thriller assembled on a desktop computer in 1997 for--get this--$900, mixes interviews and "found footage" in its story...
...Blair Witch, like any movie, has many antecedents. It is, by our casual count, the 873rd horror movie about youths who go into the woods on a lark and come out on a slab; the 4,982nd in which people disappear in reverse order of star quality; and the zillionth in which kids are frightened into a state of suicidal stupidity. Horror's evil creatures don't have to be very cunning when the heroes keep wandering in circles or deeper into the old dark house...
...something else attracted critics and the first knowing viewers to Blair Witch, and that is the film's bold sense of withholding. Horror, after all, is a genre that gravitates to the lurid edge. The jaded audience wants more--more teasing sex, more gross-out gore. So directors make their young minor characters play the sin-and-repent game: you have sex, then you die horribly. Makeup maestros like Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead) dream up (or nightmare up) grotesque faces and prostheses. Screeching violins italicize the killer's abrupt entrance as he raises his knife behind the fair...