I’m not what you might call a “scary movie buff,” but I probably do watch more scary movies than the average person. Every autumn leading up to Halloween is prime scary movie season, so of course I get a ramped up desire to watch something that is guaranteed to make me look twice at the dark corners of my house.
Of all the scary movies that I have seen, four films in particular really jump out at me (get it?) as my all-time favorite scary movie viewing experiences. Now these may not be the best horror films of all time, but they are my favorite watching-experiences because of the situations that I experienced when watching them. Horror movies are often about the mood, environment, and circumstances when watched, and my circumstances viewing the following four were perfect.
3. The Blair Witch Project
For those of you that watched horror movies in 1999, perhaps you remember the anomaly and phenomenon that was The Blair Witch Project. It was the horror movie pioneer of the “found-footage home video” style of shooting and went on as the champion of this low-budget-to-mass-market-appeal up until 2009 when Paranormal Activity came out.
In 1999, if you did a search on the Internet for The Blair Witch, you might have come across an image like this, leading many to believe that these people really were missing.
What was great about this film was that it was marketed as if it really was actual video footage that was found about real missing people. And what you have to remember about this is that in 1999, most people still didn’t really have steady access to the Internet and even if they did, it certainly wasn’t the robust source of information and dialogue that it is today. People genuinely didn’t know if this was real footage or not (a relatively new marketing tactic for a horror movie at the time).
Well amidst all of the hype for the film, two buddies and I decided to rent and watch The Blair Witch Project once it came out. There we were, three 13 year-old boys watching the “actual video footage” of three young people getting lost in the woods of Maryland as they sought out the truth behind the Blair Witch legend. And as the characters got more lost and more scared, we huddled together and got more and more anxious in the dark of my friend’s living room.
While I do think The Blair Witch Project is a great film, what really leaves it Read More
