It was the year 2000....

It's hard to get immersed into a movie this way. That's how I watched the movie too, in the idea that I had no idea what "The Blair Witch Project" was. No internet back then, it was on the television on a night. I honestly believed it to be a documentary. Scared the crap out of me. Wasn't able to sleep that night, I kept hearing screams in the distance, every noise outside made me uncomfortable.

These days, you see all the scary things in the trailer. Even if you don't watch the trailer, you just hear people talking in the theater, as they saw the trailer, and they read stuff about the movie online. So, you pretty much go to see the expanded trailer.

No wonder that movies do not manage to amaze the audience anymore. They make tons of movies, and all the cinemas are running the same movie for few days. They need to gather people in the cinema in those few days, otherwise, that movie is a flop. In 3-4 days, you can expect people that saw to talk about it and encourage people that didn't saw to go see it. So, they need to attract people into the cinema through trailers.

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Trivia: The first VHS title I ever owned was Back to the Future. The Blair Witch Project was the last VHS title I ever bought.
I didn't up it to DVD until last week; hadn't watched it for 15yrs until tonight.

B grade, its psychological stuff holds well enough seeing as the improv actors were punchy out in the cold damp forest for 72hrs+. Alas, its fear factor is vanished.

...my essential 50 http://www.imdb.com/list/ls056413299/

Right when this movie came out before it hit the big theaters you could only see it at independent theaters.

I went to this dingy place in queens ny and for a few months this was considered real

I saw it in the theater. But before it blew up and grabbed headlines as the new #1 film of the week.

The marketing was excellent. They leaked a little information on the radio to suggest real footage had been found. That alone elicited my curiosity. Then, it was only showing in one small theater 30 miles from where I lived. So I drove there only to find it was sold out. The next week I was determined to return to that theater and get a ticket. When I discovered it was playing in a second theater about 20 miles closer. But then the problem I ran into was going to get a ticket for the 8 PM show only to find that everything was sold out except for the last show (around midnight). So I got a ticket for that show, drove home and then returned later. There was a mob of frustrated people outside who couldn't get a ticket.

So I enter a packed house. The mood was perfect. The cavernous theater perfectly echoed every snap of a branch and every unknown sound in the dark. Everyone was mesmerized. I was totally drawn in and loved it. Again, it was before the hype so people were walking out of the theater questioning if it was real footage or not. Sounds silly now. But it was a blast then.

That kind of experience is truly once in a lifetime never to be repeated.

I saw it in the theatre and it was ruined for me by a pack of teens laughing at the film (especially when one dude starts rocking while eating leaves or something).

I also didn’t buy that they would continue making their film project after things went south and they were clearly in mortal danger.

Might need to revisit it.

what helped pushed this movie to another level is that people actually thought the movie was real - the actors in this film were unknowns, the found footage style (which was still newfangled) gave an aura of realism, and there wasn’t widespread social media detectives to dispel rumors in 2000. If I recall correctly, the film studio, in the movie’s website page, even hinted that the events of Blair Witch Project were real too: they listed the actors in the movie as deceased or “whereabouts unknown”

That is the best and only way to see the film to get the full effect -- surround sound and in the dark.

My experience was like that except in a packed theater at midnight (all earlier shows were sold out).

It was opening weekend, the atmosphere was electric, the film absolutely engrossing.

I didn't realize how unnerved I was by the film (particularly the ending) until I arrived home, sat down at my desk to check email, then my dog heard me inside the house and popped up in my window to say hello.

I felt like I jumped 10 feet out of my chair. Told him he scared the #$@!% out of me.