Critics reviews

You don't need gimmicks or marketing campaigns to appreciate the elegance of The Blair Witch Project's final seconds. It's just a man standing in the corner of a room—no effects, no twists, no sudden jolt of surprise. And yet through all the nonsense that surrounds the film's reputation it endures for what it is: a moment of genuine terror.

The Blair Witch Project is one of the goriest movies ever made: It's 81 minutes of nerves being slowly shredded before your eyes... The woods here are just a big, empty room, and the screaming, bickering, and blame-tossing isn't a grating distraction from the main story. It _is_ the main story.

...This still disturbing, nigh essential work of horror deserves so much more than a sniff of nostalgic recognition... There's enough richness in the conception itself to potentially carry the film, but Myrick and Sanchez's low-budget innovation and visual approach is clearly what made Blair Witch such a phenomenon.

Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project is as riveting and terrifying a study of fear as it is a chilling reminder of the inscrutability of myth... Terrifying despite the fact that so little happens, The Blair Witch Project is most remarkable in its evocation of myths refusing comprehension.

There is no art in this, no cinematic quality worth talking about. It makes the Danish Dogme series look sophisticated... However, the concept is clever. The performances are naturalistic and believable. The dialogue sounds improvised - no-one could write banality this well.

Inevitably, the film has more rough edges than most (many deliberate), and the improvised dialogue veers from the unsettlingly convincing and the needlessly rambling. But as an object lesson of how little you need for terror beyond pitch darkness, The Blair Witch Project deserves all its success, and then some.

It represents the ultimate triumph of the Sundance scam: Make a heartless home movie, get enough critics to blurb in near unison "scary," and watch the suckers flock to be fleeced. This fictional documentary within a pseudo-documentary form may be the most overrated, under-financed piece of film to come down the pike in a long time. Incidentally, when did "scary" become the highest commercial accolade a movie could receive?

The Blair Witch Project demonstrates that there’s nothing scarier than nothing... Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez have harnessed the most irrational fears of every human alive. They have reanimated the genre not by adding to it but subtracting from it–by cooking it down to its bare bones and then rattling those bones like fiends.

Horror films that tap into our hard-wired instinctive fears probe a deeper place than movies with more sophisticated threats... "The Blair Witch Project," an extraordinarily effective horror film, knows this and uses it.

"The Blair Witch Project" is the scariest movie I've ever seen. Not the goriest, the grossest, the weirdest, the eeriest, the sickest, the creepiest or the slimiest... Just flat out the scariest.

There's no denying the terror in "The Blair Witch Project." It's fierce, it's palpable and it gets deep under the skin in a way few movies do... The thrills in this one-of-a-kind film [are] the raw, soul-scraping horror of a nightmare.

"Blair Witch" forgoes a literal boogeyman in favor of the unseen, which, in this case, is as scarily bone-chilling as anything they could show you.