The Blair Witch Project Movie Review

Movie Review  

The Blair Witch Project

 

 

The ability to cope with the environmental uncertainties of life at its lowest is an instinctual part of our nature as human beings. We don’t fear the naturality of life itself, it’s the unknown. 

 

“The Blair Witch Project,” an artistic, unmethodical; low-budget horror movie directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, is an improvisational found footage classic of 1999. The found footage tells the tale of three film students who’ve travelled to a small historic town called Burkittsville. Here, they collect documentary footage about the ‘Blair Witch’, an ancient local murderer. As their days in the town pass, and they’ve accumulated hints towards the tale’s reality, their project takes an unnerving turn when the students lose their way and minds; as they realise, they are in the midst of torment.  

 

It is not a beautiful film. It is raw. ‘Low-Budget’ was no overstatement. It’s unfiltered display of realism within life’s detriment. The implied violence and offscreen intimidation towards the film’s characters is a creative and open-minded way of giving the viewers an intimate relationship with the plot and to be immersed in that sense of the unknown alongside the characters themselves. I love how we never see the Blair Witch ‘itself’ in the movie, which leaves us with the question – who did the killing? It then allows us to conspiracize with the main characters and their roles in the story. The use of low-budget natural lighting really added that sense of realism to me, such as with the unstable camera shots. It is as if I was there myself, in person.  

 

With the clear intentions of the film’s bleak ending left for us to conceptualise, the indistinct conclusion will always be a mystery.