Jaden Jordan
- Aug 15, 2019
- 2 min read

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Updated: Aug 2, 2021

The Breakdown: Three amateur filmmakers get lost in the woods while shooting a documentary about a local urban legend.

Watch If: You feel some sort of obligation to see it before you discuss how bad it is, like I did.

Not If: You can think of any excuse not to.

SECONDARY FACTS

Overall Rating: 1.6

Length: 1:21, most of which is spent screaming in the woods and arguing.

Country: USA

Language: English

Scare Factor: 0/5

Gore Factor: 1/5

REVIEW

THE QUICK AND DIRTY

While The Blair Witch Project has an amount of cultural significance in the rise of the found footage film, it is, by modern standards, basically unwatchable. It's three college kids screwing around in the woods for an annoying amount of time with nothing really happening.

PREMISE: 3

Witch's ghosts are a fun topic that rarely makes its way out of children's ghost stories, so the idea of someone making an amateur film about it is an entertaining idea. And for the time period, the idea of a found footage film was still based in isolated cases, like Cannibal Holocaust, so a lot of the hype around this movie was steeped in the "could it be real" mentality. It came out in the era where internet was still a luxury, so the concept of a creepy video turning up hadn't jaded the receiving audience.

ACTING: 2

The actors in this film may have never witnessed human interaction before. It's cringey to watch them attempt to portray things like friendship, or panic, but they have frustration down pat. So much so, that it's impossible to watch them and not get annoyed by everyone on the screen.

If you go into it under the pretense that all the actors are secretly reptilians dressed like people doing their final project in their human studies class, then they did an amazing job.

AUDIO AND VISUALS: 1

There is something to be said for the authenticity provided by poor filming in a shaky cam film. But no matter how you slice it, if your sound design is less than stellar, you cannot insert long stretches of blank screens and expect your audience to remain in anyway invested in your film. It's not clever, it's boring. If the sound design were better, it could have been an interesting concept, but apparently execution ruins all ideas in the end.

ATMOSPHERE: 1

It's honestly painful to watch. The Blair Witch Project is incredibly slow and annoying, and there's nothing happening. When something finally does happen, it's just not enough payoff for the amount of time the viewer puts into the film.

DELIVERY: 1

There's a part of me that wonders how much of a disservice the insane amount of hype that surrounds this film has done to it. But regardless of any iconic value it has, it's not entertaining, it's not interesting, it's not compelling, and the characters are so incredibly useless that it's impossible to sympathize with them at all. All in all, it's a miss. Find something better to do with your time.