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| Movies,
Graham Bower,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F5
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After months of anticipation, Blair Witch finally arrives to thrill and horrify UK audiences.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, where have you been for the past few months? With endless media hype, it would be hard to escape the pre-release publicity for this one, but just for the record...
When headstrong Heather heads off into the woods with reluctant film students Josh & Mike, they have no idea what they are letting themselves in for. Intrigued by local legends, Heather sets out to make a film about the mythology surrounding the Blair Witch. It turns out that the witch is not so much a myth, but more a cold, hard and very scary reality.
Or is she? Because throughout the movie, one character notable for her absence is the wicked old witch herself. You don't see so much as a silhouette of her. No flashy Industrial Light & Magic computer graphics here. Instead, Blair Witch uses atmosphere and verisimilitude to evoke the fear and forboding for which it was dubbed "the scariest film ever made" by US audiences.
Is it really scary? Well call me the hard-man of movie-going, but I've yet to be scared by any stip of celluloid I've encountered, and this film was unable to strike fear in my soul. Maybe it would have been scarier if those woods the crew got lost in didn't look some much like the copse behind the Sainsburys car park in Guildford. Any witch really worth her salt would have picked a scarier location in which to wreak her evil magic. Nonetheless, many people I've spoken to about the film are adament it chilled them to the bone.
What I found most appealing about this movie was the interaction between the characters. The petty squabbling, and perpetually changing relationships between the group as their situation goes from bad to worse. It's a cynic's delight, and adds a sick humour to the world's scariest movie.
UK rating:
15
US rating:
R
Ricardo R. Morneno, Eduardo Sanchez, Daniel Myrick and Neal Fredericks1999, US
Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, Joshua Leonard, Bob Griffith, Jim King
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