Then, of course, something unseen attacks the person holding the camera and cuts it off. It builds to a magnificently evocative, upsetting, yet simple image: Heather (Heather Donahue) coming upon her friend Mike (Michael Williams) in the basement of an abandoned house, standing in a corner, mournfully facing the wall, matching the description of decades-earlier murder victims from earlier in the film. The handheld, conversational style of movie, following a group of documentarians who get lost in the woods of Maryland while making a movie about a spooky local legend, builds into a naturalistic horror show where every rustle of twigs provokes anxiety. I need only to think of its final shot, and I shiver. I can’t claim that I saw Blair Witch early enough to mistake its convincing faux-documentary setup for reality, but I did manage to catch it before it reached a wide enough audience to inspire countless jokes and spoofs (I can only imagine the cheesy memes we’d have to endure if it came out today), and it has stuck with me ever since. Has more than two decades of found-footage horror further blunted the impact of The Blair Witch Project, which plenty of folks were already shrugging off as boring and unscary back in 1999? Maybe, but not for me.
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