The Blair Witch Project: Is it safe to talk about this film in a positive manner these days? Even after nearly 20 years, passions are bound to get a little heated when discussing this film, praised for its innovative approach to filmmaking almost as much as it is damned for laying down the groundwork for a sub-genre that has gone on to become so reviled in such a short amount of time that it's hard for some folks to remember if there was ever a good found footage film. It's a strange thing then that somehow, this has been accused of being just like all the rest, when after watching this after such a long period, it's crazy to me that this isn't appraised higher for how little it resembles what the sub-genre would become. Sure, damn near everyone lifted the grainy VHS footage aesthetic wholesale, but I'm struggling to think of another film that does so convincing a job of selling this as the work of amateur filmmakers as this one does, with the clumsiness of the camera setups for even the "professional" scenes to the extremely poor lighting turning already low quality footage into soupy splotches of darkness. On paper, that should be the deal breaker to end them all, but in practice and execution, what Sanchez, Myrick and the cast have done was find a way of grounding the film in a way that makes everything feel just a little too real, a little too invasive and a little too much to take in. Credit has to go in part to how the story itself is told: rather than taking a conventional narrative approach, as so many found footage films fall into the trap of, everything feels intentionally piecemeal as to avoid easy classification. There isn't much in the way of character arcs, helping to emphasize just how remote and unknown the crew is to one another even when finding common ground, and the sense of escalation never quite pairs up with how you expect a horror movie to play out, with almost nothing in the way of on-screen violence and a villainous force that's just that: an entity that moves through sight unseen, yet is present everywhere. Even today, that kind of approach remains radical and rarely touched upon, so it's hard to imagine how many people were able to grasp it back when it was new, with little to reference beyond the ones who could stomach the likes of Cannibal Holocaust and the fifteen people that managed to catch The Last Broadcast. There is a remarkable level of care and craft that's also present in other factors, too: the audio is honestly the scariest part of the film, especially the eternally eerie detail that the camera isn't able to pick up absolutely everything the crew hears, and the amount of lore you pick up along the way helps to create a far more horrifying monster than could ever be depicted properly, making its non-appearance all the more effective and horrifying. It's a film that honestly does too good a job in looking like the work of amateurs, as it's hard to mix it up with something far more lazy and uninspired when you're not paying attention to how it's all being delivered. It's a film that for being less than 80 minutes long without its credits, it exhibits an incredible amount of patience even after it unleashes the scares and commits thoroughly to its devices and methods. Damn near every found footage film out there could be told more conventionally and lose nothing, but this one pulls off a most rare and genuinely disturbing feat: it truly feels like someone poring through as much usable footage as they possibly can, hoping to find some kind of clue to what happened when they already know it won't ever be found, something tangible to pin it on when it's evasive and inscrutable, and trying to make sense of a situation that's constantly fighting back to remain senseless. It's a damn great film, and one that pulled off the rarest feat of all for a sub-genre: it was the first and the final authority on the matter.
