Fiction or reality? One comes to ask the question. Is this story true? We don’t know, but we do know that many urban legends revolve around the film: from the witch of Blair to Rustin Parr, all this folklore has enough to feed our imagination. Especially for those who have seen the featurette following the DVD.
Beyond this rather particular narrative concept, “The Blair Witch Project” has the merit of effectively laying the foundations of any good horror film: A quick and explicit presentation of the main characters (for once not too cliché), an introduction to the legend of the Blair Witch via interviews with local residents by our three budding filmmakers and finally a quick introduction to what will be the scary place where our heroes will venture: The Blair Forest, the witch’s domain.
The great quality of “The Blair Witch Project” is that it does not show us directly the “thing” that haunts and threatens the main characters. This invisible enemy will psychologically torture the three heroes and will only take physical form during the last act of the film. The psychic impact of this disturbing and morbid force is of course reinforced by the subjective camera process used in the work: The fourth student venturing into the forest is us!
So the strength of Blair Witch is that it lets us imagine. The secrets that the forest holds, the origin of those creepy noises… everything is suggested, nothing is shown. It’s up to each one’s perception and that’s what makes this film unique. Made with four strings and two dollars, the work is devilishly effective and manages to impose its particular style (with little action and a very slow treatment) in a genre cinema that demands more and more gore.
