Heather Donahue plays herself in 'The Blair Witch Project.'

by Jeremy Pratte
special to The Current

What better way to make a film scarier than to market the events contained within it as real?

The mythology of 'The Blair Witch Project' goes like this: In October, 1994, three film students got lost in the woods in Burkitsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary on the Blair Witch and they were never seen again. Then, a year later, their footage was found and put together into a movie.

Sounds believable, doesn't it?

Most people by now know that the entire story about the filmmakers disappearing is untrue. Most people also know that the three "students" - Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams (who are very much alive) - are just actors using their real names, and that the real film's directors and writers are two guys from Florida named Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick.

Why, if you know this information, is the movie still so scary? Why do you get more freaked out the more you think about it after you've seen it?

To fully understand this, a few facts must be straightened out first.

The legend of the Blair Witch was made up by Sanchez and Myrick to give Burkitsville - which is a real Maryland town - a sense of history and evilness. The stars were really sent out into the woods for eight days with cameras and picked up minimal rations and notes from the crew daily. They, however, did not get lost. The film seemed so real that during the showing I wondered if the stars really did inadvertently get lost in the woods. That is how believable their performance was.

Donahue, Leonard, and Williams knew their characters and the set up of the movie, but improvised most of it. There was no script, only a general outline of what they had to do. Most of what happened in the woods as the story unfolded was not planned. This is why it seemed so real. This is why your heart beats faster when they first realize they're lost. This is why you feel for them when they begin fighting with each other. This is why your blood turns cold when the weird sounds at night start, when they discover the intimidating wooden artifacts, when one of them disappears, and when you watch the haunting final scene.

The Blair Witch project is a good horror flick - the movie and it's paltry $20,000 budget whips the snot out of any of those one hundred million dollar jokes like "The Haunting" which just pile on special effects and make you laugh more than gasp. There are no monsters or witches in The Blair Witch project. It is what you don't see that scares you. The ambiguity of what's going on during the intense night scenes freaks you out a hundred times more than if Sanchez and Myrick had included a CGI witch on a broomstick.

I'm not jumping on any bandwagon here and praising The Blair Witch Project just because most other critics have. I just came, I saw, I liked. And I think you will like it, too.