| 100 |
Chicago Tribune
Marc Caro
Many of us may have thought that with the world offering so much vivid horribleness every day, movies had lost the power to give us a good cathartic scare. It's a shock -- and a pleasure -- to discover we were wrong.
|
| 100 |
Chicago Sun-Times
At a time when digital techniques can show us almost anything, The Blair Witch Project is a reminder that what really scares us is the stuff we can't see.
|
| 100 |
Austin Chronicle
Ingenious in its simplicity.
|
| 91 |
Portland Oregonian
It breaks so sharply from the practice of contemporary horror film that it requires us to return to the most basic understanding of what it is to be frightened by a movie.
|
| 90 |
Washington Post
Lloyd Rose
The Blair Witch Project is terrifying. It's also an exuberant prank of genius.
|
| 90 |
Variety
An intensely imaginative piece of conceptual filmmaking that also delivers the goods as a dread-drenched horror movie.
|
| 90 |
Mr. Showbiz
It might be the scariest movie ever made.
|
| 90 |
Dallas Observer
M. V. Moorhead
Easily the scariest horror picture of the '90s, a movie that can take a place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers.
|
| 90 |
The New York Times
A nifty example of how to make something out of nothing. Nothing but imagination, and a game plan so enterprising it should elevate its creators to pinup status at film schools everywhere.
|
| 90 |
Film.com
Man, I just can't recommend this enough.
|
| 90 |
TNT RoughCut
The what-you-don't-see element makes this an excellent film for people with overactive imaginations, and if that's you, it will scare the living crap out of you.
|
| 88 |
New York Daily News
The inexplicably terrifying ending is good for a month's worth of nightmares -- no small thing for a movie in such a saturated field.
|
| 88 |
San Francisco Examiner
Blair Witch forgoes a literal boogeyman in favor of the unseen, which, in this case, is as scarily bone-chilling as anything they could show you.
|
| 88 |
New York Post
May be the creepiest and most original horror film since John Carpenter's classic "Halloween."
|
| 88 |
ReelViews
Caused a major stir with Sundance, and for good reason -- it was perhaps the most offbeat, energetic, and eye-opening motion picture to screen there.
|
| 88 |
USA Today
The suspense becomes so unbearable that it's easy to overlook questions about whether anyone in such circumstances would continue filming.
|
| 80 |
Salon.com
The most inventive and genuinely frightening horror movie to appear in years.
|
| 80 |
LA Weekly
It's a small film whose power is derived from its stripped-down scale.
|
| 80 |
TV Guide
It's as chilling as Algernon Blackwood's elegantly unnerving "The Willows," played absolutely, unsettlingly straight.
|
| 80 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
A truly scary horror film, something akin to a lost art these days.
|
| 80 |
Slate
No part of us is allowed to relax. Ever.
|
| 80 |
Village Voice
Paranoid, hysterical, and programmatically subjective, the movie is in every sense a psychological thriller. Although the payoff is ambiguous, the experience remains in the mind. It's an absolutely restrained and truly frightening movie.
|
| 75 |
Entertainment Weekly
As a horror picture, Blair Witch may not be much more than a cheeky game, a novelty with the cool, blurry look of an avant-garde artifact. But as a manifestation of multimedia synergy, it's pretty spooky.
|
| 75 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
An ultra-cheap movie, ingeniously promoted through the Internet -- is notable primarily as a model of guerrilla-style niche-marketing.
|
| 75 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
As amateurish and fumbling as it is in every department, the sum total of the movie is pretty darn scary.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Certain to nauseate a portion of its audience.
|
| 70 |
Film.com
The great power of the film lies in its simplicity, in the slow-building tension and psychological melt-downs that are the result of stark, bare-bones film-making.
|
| 70 |
Chicago Reader
A pretty impressive horror film.
|
| 70 |
Washington Post
Low-tech inventiveness at its best.
|
| 70 |
Newsweek
Jeff Giles
A fairy tale reminding us that childhood fears are deep and tangled as tree roots.
|
| 60 |
Los Angeles Times
A clever, entertaining stunt, no more, no less.
|
| 50 |
Christian Science Monitor
The movie would be better as a 30-minute short, though, since its shaky camera work and fuzzy images get monotonous after a while, and there's not much room for character development within the very limited plot.
|
| 50 |
Film.com
While it has its scary moments, and while its central conceit is refreshingly imaginative, there's ultimately not much there there.
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