Authorities turn up raw footage shot by a group of film students who disappeared in the Black Hills Forest of Maryland. The tape details the mysterious events leading up to their disappearance. 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. Heather Donahue is as obnoxious as she is sadly aware of the limitations that come with being a female filmmaker—she seeks control over a crew of men unwilling to give her the benefit of the doubt. Shooting a documentary on the mythical Blair Witch, Heather and her companions realize the futility of their project when the townspeople they interview prove to be less than engaging subjects. The deeper they move into the woods, the spookier their journey becomes. Their documentary becomes a diary of fear and, in the end, comes to resemble what they hoped to secure all along. They are naïve journeyfolk unaware that they’ve become pawns of the very myth they seek to capture. Terrifying despite the fact that so little happens, The Blair Witch Project is most remarkable in its evocation of myths refusing comprehension.
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