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Although it is about fifteen minutes too long and it contains too many shots of the Maryland woods and despite the fact that the hand held camerawork is occasionally disorienting in a VERY bad way, this unassuming little shocker does it's job very, very well. In fact, it does its job of scaring the shit out of its audience better than any film in decades. For about the price of a Ford Escort, the filmmakers have managed to capture something that the makers of The Haunting, for example, could not buy for eighty million dollars: real, actual terror.

The premise has three documentary filmmakers embarking to make a film about the "Blair Witch," a legendary figure said to haunt the woods around Burkittesville, Maryland. At first, it seems like a lark, documenting what the locals know about it ("I think I saw something about it on The Discovery Channel") and tromping around in the woods. Then things begin to go horribly wrong. They get lost in the woods. They begin to find strange stick and rock formations. The woods seem to turn around on them, like Canavan's Backyard. Strange sounds are heard in the night and strange leavings are found in the morning around their camp. This works as well as it does because the audience sees only what the characters see.

There are no cheap shocks provided by things jumping into frame or monsters with zippers up their backs or matte lines on their outlines. The woods are a creepy place, filmed late in the year to provide a feeling of autumnal collapse. There is only the primal fear of something circling just outside the sphere of perception. This weaves a powerful spell. The conceit of the film works in its favor. It convinces the audience of its reality by virtue of its very cheapness. It looks almost like someone's home movies run horribly amok. And the ending provides one of the purest moments of terror in film. My head was buzzing for an hour afterwards.