The horror lies in how the film is made, and the way the actors show their fear. However, in The Blair Witch Project, the audience never get to actually see anything. In many horror films, you expect to see blood, gore, monsters or demons which are genrally scary things. The audience imagine themselves in the student’s situation, which can be done because of how realistic the film is.
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This film is scary for an audience due to the hand held cameras and the way the film is made to look like real life, with normal every-day people just like you. She is then presumably killed, just like all the other children were. When Heather enters the basement after Mike and finds him standing in the corner of the room. The handprints on the walls symbolising all the deaths the Blair Witch has taken and killed as revenge for being cast out of the community into the woods in 1785.
#Critical reviews of the blair witch project 2016 full
In the start of the film, Heather talks about how the graveyard is unusually full of children’s graves. They are very low down, suggesting that they are all children’s hands. Next, you can see small handprints in blood on the walls. This can also be seen as a foreshadowing of death, and also symbolising that it is Rustin Parrs house, the child killer who was hanged claiming to be possessed by the Blair Witch. When Heather enters the house, a hangman’s noose is seen next to the doorway. The large stick figures are seen again which foreshadows the death of anyone who enters it, in this case Heather and Mike. Heather and Mike, now that Josh is nowhere to be found, carry on and end up at a house. They are a warning for the students to not progress anymore. Later on, the students also discover an area filled with wooden stick figures hanging from the trees symbolising death and danger as they appear between the students and the house near the films climax. Each Cairn represents one of the students, and their inevitable death. The next day after the student’s tent had been attacked, they found three extra Cairns built around their campsite, which were not there before. Josh had been marked by the Witch, which is also apparent, as he is the first one to go missing and presumably die. Josh’s reckless actions foreshadow later events when the students tent is attacked during the night, they come back and only Josh’s items have been covered in blue slime when no one else’s had. One of these Cairns is knocked over by Josh. Each one of these Cairns represents one of the dead children. One of these events is that the trio find a cemetery with 7 Cairns in it. Although this seems like just another story of the local residents, this foreshadows a lot of future events in the film. Rustin would take the children to his house in the woods, take 2 down to the basement and make one of them face the corner of the room while he killed the other. When interviewing local residents before they go out into the woods, one man talks about Rustin Parr, who had claimed that the Blair Witch forced him to kill 7 young children in the 1940’s. The first part of the film shows the trio looking forward to the adventure they are about to go on. This works well as it lets the audience vaguely find out what will happen to the characters, without being explicit enough to take away the shock value of later events. The film has a strong emphasis on foreshadowing throughout the film.
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This means the horror lies in how these students disappeared. The synopsis of the film already gives away the ending that the students go missing (or died) and therefore we know that they wont survive or make it back. However, these three students go missing and never come back, and this film is the footage that was found. The film is about three students, who go out into the woods to investigate the myth of the Blair Witch.
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It is in fact very intelligent, thought provoking and arguably much more scarier. Unlike many horror films, The Blair Witch Project is a psychological thriller, and is not based around graphic violence or torture like SAW. The film is a documentary-style film, the first of its time, and has said to be the benchmark for similar films such as Paranormal Activity. The film stars Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael C. The Blair Witch Project is an American psychological thriller, released in 1999, directed and written by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez.