The Blair Witch Project

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT

Ok, there's been much hype about The Blair Witch Project ever since it's showing at Sundance. But is it all that it's cracked up to be? Well, no not really. Yes, there's some good build up of suspense and the actings pretty good. I think the filmmakers did a good job of widdling the sixteen hours of footage that was reportly shot by the actors down to something that looked like a real film.

What gets me is that so many people seem to think of this film as a milestone much in the way Night of the Living Dead or Texas Chain Saw Massacre are. And it's not. Both of those films did things that no one had done before--in part, they broke taboos. BWP hardly broke any taboos; it was more interested in generating fear and suspense through the illision of reality. Much like Texas Chain Saw's documentary feel, Blair Witch went a step further and became a documentary film, albeit a phony one. And you see, the documentry feel has been done before, so BWP isn't breaking any new ground there. In fact, Cannibal Holocaust has done the filmmaker point-of-view roughly twenty-years ago.

Yes, I believe The Blair Witch Project is a fine film and I'm happy for the success for this indy production (especially since it's a horror film), but, still, I feel that it's highly overrated.

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