1999 Sundance Film Festival Catalog Description
The Blair Witch Project
Picture yourself stranded in the woods, paralyzed
by the night, and bombarded by the aural and physical evidence of your
deepest, darkest phobias. If you've ever faced the demons of the night,
you'll understand the rich psychology of fear that permeates "The Blair
Witch Project," a film which catapults us into the seat of pure, unadulterated,
primordial horror. "Friday the 13th," eat your heart out - this is bone-chilling,
soul-stirring, cardiac-arrest-styled terror, made all the scarier by its
exacting authenticity.
Shot in real time on video and 16 mm film, "The
Blair Witch Project" is the firsthand account of three student documentary
filmmakers who venture into Maryland's remote Black Hills to discover the
truth about the local scaremonger, the mythical Blair Witch. After the
trio disappear without a trace, their footage is unearthed one year later,
revealing a terrifying account of the event's which marked their final
days. It is an edited compendium of the purported filmmaker's findings
that forms the harrowing content of "The Blair Witch Project."
Brilliantly blurring the lines between fact and
fiction, "The Blair Witch Project" redefine's the horror genre with sheer
cinematic ingenuity, urgency, and invention. Deftly building suspense through
sound, visuals, and performances of unparalleled realism, "The Blair Witch
Project's" violence is psychological, not physical; nary a drop of blood
is spackled onscreen. But the result is none-the-less frightening, as the
cameras bite into the heart of darkness, documenting the emergence of evil
and the mounting hysteria of its unwitting victims.
