The Blair Witch Project. 1999. USA. Written and directed by Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez. With Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, Joshua Leonard. 35mm. 81 min.
Though you hopefully won’t find it painted on an abandoned cabin wall or chiseled in ancient runes, there is a basic folk-horror recipe: urban outsiders encroach on a remote enclave/wilderness where they seek out/run afoul of spooky local myths/ancient belief systems and live (however briefly) to regret it. The Blair Witch Project wasn’t the first film to add a “found footage” angle to this formula—that honor goes to the 1980 gore-fest *Cannibal Holocaust*—but it was certainly the most influential. When a trio of documentarians head into the Maryland woods to investigate the legend of the “Blair Witch,” their sense of adventure rapidly curdles into terror as they go from lost to disoriented to hunted by an unseen force. Utterly convincing performances and the immediacy of the handheld cameras create a ratcheting sense of immersion and dread that purportedly led some early viewers to believe they were watching actual documentary footage. The film’s surprising success turned the found footage angle into a common horror trope, but in terms of sheer onscreen terror, few of its many imitators have even come close.