It is amazing how these things change. The Blair Witch Project is 87 minutes of nothing. That isn't a critique on the movie, I just know that is what my nine year old mind would have said. From that child's perspective, the movie was about people wandering in the forest. No wild animal attacks they had to fend off. No horrible storms that swept all their equipment into the river. No impending doom like a forest fire. It rained. They lost a map. They came across eerie things.

So why was this scary? The horror unseen is the greatest horror of them all. I've been camping, there are weird noises all over the place. More so, I've stumbled across old cabins in the woods, and bizarre artifacts, usually created by other hikers and campers. I know I've made enough myself. But when put all together, in one package, throwing in the stress of being lost, the tension begins to mount. Everything becomes a puzzle, the solution to which will not help you escape. And you don't even know what you are escaping.

That's the worst. Give me the Alien again, any day. It may have looked horrifying, but at least you could act against it. How can you act against weird noises? Piles of rocks? The sounds of children?

H.P. Lovecraft wrote in this style. The horrors he envisioned cannot be stopped by a gun. Cannot be stopped by trickery. If they are stopped at all it is because someone cracked open a book of arcane knowledge and used it to temporarily keep the horror at bay and in the process losing all sense of sanity.

The Blair Witch Project never once shows you the horror which terrorizes those three filmmakers. But I can imagine it. Over and over. My imagination being influenced by the subtle descriptions of past events. Men disemboweled. Children with eyes cut out. The very words, the scant description doing more to send chills down my spine than some hollywood gorey special effect which always leads one to say "where is all the blood?" or "why is the blood spurting like a faucet?"