The Blair Witch Project

In an ideal world, nobody would have been allowed to write anything about The Blair Witch Project before its release, and everybody could have experienced the shock at maximum impact. That might have carried its own dangers, however: people might literally have died from the terror.

Shot on a miniscule budget of $25,000, the much-heralded Blair Witch Project is without doubt one of the most original, ingeniously-conceived and immaculately-executed films of all time, and its place in history is already assured. We're not talking cult-status here, either: the film has already reaped $135million at American box-offices.

If you are fortunate enough to have just returned from a cave in the Himalayas and you've escaped the endless media blabber about the film, you must go as soon as possible, and don't blame me if you end up suffering a cardiac arrest or an all-out nervous breakdown. The broad outlines of the film's context are briefly explained in the opening shot: in October of 1994, three student film-makers disappeared in the woods near Burkettsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.

Then comes the footage itself, entirely shot on hand-held cheapo cameras and haphazardly pieced together, which documents the filmmakers' incursion into a large woodland in Maryland which had been the subject of sinister rumours in the locality for years. What unfolds is enough to make the mind split open.

Scary? Phenomenally so, if taken entirely at face value. Which is where the problem comes in: the film's biggest flaw is the massive press attention it has already generated. I scare quite easily as a general thing, but no matter how much I enjoyed the film and appreciated its unique genius, I can't say it spooked me in the slightest. The Blair Witch Project caught everyone by surprise on its Stateside release, but viewers on this side of the Atlantic have had to wait at least six months while word of mouth has built to a crescendo of dark whisperings, and by this stage, the film's 'scariness' has been hyped up so relentlessly that it can't help but underwhelm.

When you've stripped away all the hype that attends the film, its essence couldn't be simpler: a gang of complete unknowns who ventured into an isolated wilderness, armed only with camcorders and a few days' provisions, have ended up making one of the all-time great horror movies.

One of the brilliant things about The Blair Witch Project is its affirmation that gore definitely isn't needed in order to terrify. Instead, the film's vicious aura of malevolence is derived almost entirely from the eerie circumstances of its surroundings. Primal fear of the dark and the wilderness doesn't disappear with childhood, it just dilutes - and woodlands can be pretty frightening places, as anyone who's ever found themselves alone and directionless in St. Anne's Park after dark on extremely bad acid can testify.

The film was, in actual fact, the brainchild of directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, who can't have done a whole lot of work on it aside from piecing together the students' footage and grabbing all the credit. The 'actors' (Heather, Josh and Mike) were left in the woods for a week, give written daily instructions on what to film, and subjected to all manner of psychological torture techniques in order to turn them into the quaking, petrified wrecks they have visibly become long before the film reaches its blood-curdling climax.

They weren't actually murdered, but few films in history can have been as unpleasant for the participants to film. I know of people who saw The Blair Witch Project months ago and still haven't slept comfortably since.

See it as soon as you can, and keep reminding yourself it's only a movie . . .