What a retarded POC! “Ooh…ahh… it’s the scariest film ever!” the reviewers said. I was so looking forward to watching this late at night in the dark with my 12 year old son and getting a good scare. He kept looking back at me throughout the film saying “It’s gonna get scary now right?” and I kept looking at him saying “Well I hope so!”
The only moment of possible scariness was at the end where the Mike guy was standing in the corner when she went downstairs.
How in the world was this jumbled, silly nonsense supposed to be scary? Did you have to be in theatre full of 16 year old girls and their dates.
It was scary the first two weeks when people didn’t know if it was real or fake. After that it was just a stupid story about three dumb hippies saying “f*ck” alot and getting lost.
I watched it with a bunch of teens, hoping to be terrorfied, but having had a few drinks and feeling relaxed it just struck me as really stupid. Whenever you were meant to be scared by things that couldn’t be seen I would just look at yet another shot of the woods and think, “The tree scared them?”. I didn’t last to the end, the kids kicked me out for laughing at it.
The Blair Witch is a perfect example of something being ruined by it’s own hype.
I saw it at midnight the night before it came out. I had never even heard of it but a friend of mine wanted to see it so we went. I wouldn’t say it really scared the shit out of me but it definitely gave me the creeps and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the next day or two.
Now that it was so overhyped you can’t really get the feeling of how out-of-left-field it was. I haven’t seen it since that night and I’ll never watch it again but it would be on any top 20 list of mine.
I didn’t care for it when I saw it a few years back. Then after moving here, we drive past the fabled woods on the way out to Jonathan Chance’s place, and they’re only about a mile or two wide.
I thought the movie was ok, but I couldn’t get around the fact that they were “lost” in an area that I know (I’ve been hiking in the area) that there is no place further than about two miles from “civilization”. Even a vexed hippie could follow the stream out of the woods there. It’s the same flaw as most horror movies, the victims don’t just LEAVE, GODDAMNIT.
Scary is very relative. What scares you might not scare someone else. I don’t like slasher flicks, which many folks think of when the want to see a ‘scary’ movie.
The film was very spooky and I thought a lot about it. (I grew near woods that resembled those woods). It brought back some creepy memories. And I liked the legend and the fact that they never saw what was chasing them.
I thought the idea was that no matter how far they walked, they would only find themselves in the same area they had been in before. It’s not that they were supposed to be that bad at navigating, it’s that the “supernatural” forces were making it impossible for them to leave. Remember - they were supposed to be walking for hours in a single direction only to find themselves back where they started.
It was WAY creepier in the theater. It definitely loses its appeal on the TV. Also, it made me sick as hell and I had to spend the second half of the movie in the lobby waiting for my friends to come out.
Umm, they didn’t get lost in the woods because they are stupid idiots, or because of some fatal film flaw. They got lost in the woods because of the Witch! The Witch has a curse on those parts of the woods; once you go in, you will never come out! Duh!
The audience were supposed to think that what they were watching was actual footage shot by actual people who actually disappeared in the woods. If these people did disappear, and if what was presented was their actual footage, then it would have been very scary. But you’d have to be living under a rock to not know it was fictional. The result was that it wasn’t scary at all, because you knew it wasn’t real. The filmmakers apparently believed that audiences would believe it was real; so they didn’t do anything to make it scary.
I liked the film, but not because it was scary. I liked the concept. I liked that a low-budget picture could make so much money. I thought the casting and the acting were good (even if the characters were a bit whiny). The only thing I didn’t like was that the filmmakers didn’t make any effort to put anything scary into it, but instead relied completely on the assumption that people would think that it was real. That, and that they didn’t spend enough time on the backstory.
See Steven King’s Danse Mcabre for a discussion of the fine distinctions between “terror”, “horror”, and the “gross-out”. Blair Witch showed you nothing, yet suggested EVERYTHING.
I found it to be one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen. The disorientation of the cast, the odd things they found and heard, the sheer atmosphere of the last half of the movie, and finally the dilapidated house with the kid’s handprints all over it. shudder
I grew up on a farm in a rural area. It is perfectly possible to get lost on your own property. For city folk unfamiliar with the area, I would not question their wandering in circles, even before you factor in the Witch’s supposed influence.
I have also explored abandoned buldings deep in the woods at the backside of nowhere, some of which looked about as creepy as the one in the movie. In the daytime, exploring these old buildings is pretty bad. I can’t imagine doing it at night!
The only thing I questioned was the way they continued to film everything. At some point I would have junked the cameras. However, Heather states that as long as she kept filming, it put everything that was happening off at a psychological distance, making her feel a little less uncomfortable. A weak reed, but as convenient plot points go, about average for a cheesy horror movie.
I put off seeing the film for a long time because I thought the very concept was stupid. All my friends went and saw it and kept telling me for weeks that it was the scariest thing ever and I shouldn’t make fun of it if I hadn’t seen it.
So I went and saw it to see if it was as good as they said.
For a while I just couldn’t believe the characters’ stupidity, and shortly therafter I stopped caring and hoped they would die soon.
Then I started dozing off. I managed to stay awake, barely, and was rewarded in my efforts by not even seeing the morons get killed.
That was dissapointing. I should have just taken a nap.
You’d be surprised by how many people live under rocks.
I’m sure many of the people who saw the movie early in its run were uncertain as to whether it was real or not. I didn’t see the movie until it played at the campus theater (several months after its general release), and as I was leaving I heard another girl there tell her friend that it was a true story. I explained that it wasn’t, but this girl kept insisting that it was. She knew the footage wasn’t real, but she thought it was a movie based on an actual case of disappearing college students and possibly a partial reenactment of “real” discovered footage.
Well, they do address that in the movie. The girl says something along the lines of America having detroyed most of its natural resources and it’s impossible to get lost and stay lost. That was part of the plot. They weren’t in some untamed wilderness, they were in Maryland. Yet, they couldn’t find their way out. As already stated, it was the Blair Witch causing them to wander in circles.
I thought it was a cool movie, but to each their own.
I knew it was fake when I saw it in a theater, but it still creeped me out. Like another poster said, the kids’ handprints on the wall of that old house was pretty damn spooky.
It’s impossible to make a movie that will scare everyone, all of the time. I thought this movie’s strength was that it didn’t show anything. You didn’t know any more about what was threatening the main characters than they did.
As for the characters being whiny, well, that jives with most film students I have known. One thing that did annoy me though, was that to get out, all they had to do was walk downstream! Any Boy Scout knows that running water leads eventually to a bridge. Bridges equal roads, roads equal civilization. But I was willing to believe the characters were clueless enough not to know this.
Other than that, I thought it was an inspired concept, well executed.
I loved it, for the reasons that BrotherCadfael described above. Horror movies often irritate me by showing me a big bad scary creature that really just looks like bad computer animation or some schlemp in a rubber suit. The monsters are very rarely as scary as anything my own head comes up with. Blair Witch, by never showing me the monsters, left the horrible half-formed images in my head intact, and scared the bejeesus out of me.
Almost all of my friends loved the movie, too, and we’ve talked some about why some people were terrified by it and others hated it. We’ve come up with a few theories.
Folks who hated it: do y’all read a lot? We’ve wondered if folks who are heavy readers are used to having to create the images in their own heads, and are easier to scare with hints and suggestions. Folks who get most of their storytelling from visual sources (movies, TV shows, etc.) might be more accustomed to having the images created for them, and when they see a horror movie that doesn’t create those images, they might be dissatisfied.
One thing that did annoy me though, was that to get out, all they had to do was walk downstream! Any Boy Scout knows that running water leads eventually to a bridge. Bridges equal roads, roads equal civilization. But I was willing to believe the characters were clueless enough not to know this.