The Blair Witch Project, but 1) I really hadn’t seen much horror at that point (not too long after it came out), and 2) it made me really motion sick, so I’m not sure how much that affected things. I stayed clear of the woods for a week or two afterwards, though.
The biggest thing that made Blair Witch scary was all the marketing and hype about it. They created a whole fake conspiracy theory online with fake news articles and everything that made it sound plausible. It was in the early days of the Internet so there wasn’t the instant fact checking that would happen today.
You could probably get away with telling kids today that it was real, but wouldn’t able to generate the same hype.
The movie for me was scary but not much for a long while, especially not until the ending. The context of these strange happenings make all the difference to me. So while one could think that there might be just a lunatic out there, who does all this shit for his sadistic satisfaction (which would give give a purely human reason to everything), the ending however shifted everything and made it MUCH scarier, at least for me.
Tap for spoiler
When she ran into this empty scary house in the middle of the night in the middle of the woods, shortly before the climax, and she suddenly sees her missing friend apparently deliriously standing in the corner of some basement room in complete darkness for who knows how long, facing the walls, is so uncanny to me that it almost made me shit my pants. It is a great ending scene since it tops all the events with a heavy surrealistic touch, without explaining anything to the viewer, so your imagination has to fill in the gaps. Was there a real Witch after all? What happened to him? Is there something unexplainable out there?
The Blair Witch Project, but 1) I really hadn’t seen much horror at that point (not too long after it came out), and 2) it made me really motion sick, so I’m not sure how much that affected things. I stayed clear of the woods for a week or two afterwards, though.
The biggest thing that made Blair Witch scary was all the marketing and hype about it. They created a whole fake conspiracy theory online with fake news articles and everything that made it sound plausible. It was in the early days of the Internet so there wasn’t the instant fact checking that would happen today.
You could probably get away with telling kids today that it was real, but wouldn’t able to generate the same hype.
The movie for me was scary but not much for a long while, especially not until the ending. The context of these strange happenings make all the difference to me. So while one could think that there might be just a lunatic out there, who does all this shit for his sadistic satisfaction (which would give give a purely human reason to everything), the ending however shifted everything and made it MUCH scarier, at least for me.
Tap for spoiler
When she ran into this empty scary house in the middle of the night in the middle of the woods, shortly before the climax, and she suddenly sees her missing friend apparently deliriously standing in the corner of some basement room in complete darkness for who knows how long, facing the walls, is so uncanny to me that it almost made me shit my pants. It is a great ending scene since it tops all the events with a heavy surrealistic touch, without explaining anything to the viewer, so your imagination has to fill in the gaps. Was there a real Witch after all? What happened to him? Is there something unexplainable out there?