Where Do You Stand on the Great "Blair Witch" (1999) Debate?

It's one of the great horror films if you ask me. I love it. I watch it once or twice a year. It's marketing at the time of release is complete genius. The film making itself is genius as well. Love this movie.

I find it an annoying movie to watch. I am no fan of the FF style unless were are talking about Cannibal Holocaust which wasn't full found footage but it predated BWP by almost 2 decades.

The summer of 1999 was a great time for horror films--we had The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project and Stir of Echoes. Of the three, the biggest disappointment was The Blair Witch Project.

Like a lot of you, I'd seen "Curse of the Blair Witch" on Sci-Fi, which whet my appetite and actually turned out to be better than the actual movie. Then, I saw the film, and the theater was packed. This was gonna be a good one, I could feel it!

It started promisingly enough. But once the trio was lost in the woods and just traipsing around in a circle, I began to squirm. The lead actress had to be one of the MOST ANNOYING actresses I've ever seen, and her voice made me want to bolt for the door.

Nothing much happens, outside of them finding some weirdly put together tree branches, and someone comes and shakes their tent. Oh, and there are sounds in the woods. Woooo, scawey!

Later, they found the fabled house of the child molester who killed kids and made the other victims stand in a corner. So what happens? The chick with the uber annoying voice never once drops the fucking camera. She's got it glued to her eye as she stumbles through the forest, across the forest floor (without ever once stumbling due to a log or a gopher hole." Shrieking at the top of her lungs, she enters the house and runs up and down an unfamiliar stairway, illuminated only by the light of her camera.

And she never once puts the camera down. Huh? Do real people act that way, especially when they're freaking out?

I won't spoil the ending, but it has something to do with dying and kids standing in the corner, looking at a wall.

That's when the lights came on, and people around me went, "huh? What just happened?" I heard someone yell out, "this sucks!" Another yelled, "what a rip-off!"

I've never seen the film since. I will regret that two hours on my deathbed. I might've been able to volunteer at a soup kitchen or patted a kitty cat or swept out my house. Nooo. Instead, I wasted it on The Blair Witch Project.

This was hyped to the moon and back and was the first film to benefit from Internet saturation. I honestly believe there were studio plants who went on message boards to tout this film as the "most frightening since The Exorcist!" Guess what, it isn't

I'm happy that the whole hype went over my head. I only saw it on DVD years after it came out and don't understand what the big deal was about it. It might have been the first found footage movie that made the genre (or better said style because it isn't actually a genre) popular but that doesn't automatically make it a good movie. People who love it and can watch it over and over been saying yeah you have to let your imagination work. It's not for people who need everything to be spelled out. I honestly don't see what there is to imagine as there is not much interesting story or events. Since most what happens is improvised (or that's what they claim) anyone with a camera would be able to film it and say oh look how real it is and how realistic the people's reactions are. I'm just mentioning some of the arguments the die hard fans used. The movie isn't realistic at all, there is no witch or forrest that makes you go around in circles or perform stupid things like throwing away a map, going totally ballistic about natural night sounds from the woods. Unless there is such magical forrest or witch the point of realism is rather void. Also how did the ones finding the footage survive? Is the witch/forrest selective in its victims or did it use mailing service?
Anyway I think there isn't many other other movies where the audience either love it or hate it, there is few in between.