RP285 Really Scary

 RP285 Really Scary

In 1999, The Blair Witch Project came out. It was about three student filmmakers who had set out in 1994 to research the Blair Witch in the woods of Maryland, USA. The Blair Witch—whatever it was—had been blamed for the disappearance of children in the area for fifty years. The three students hiked into the wood and were never heard from again. Their sound and video equipment was found a year later. The footage was pieced together to tell the story of their fates.

Or was it? The Blair Witch Project was a surprising hit of 1999. It cost only under 750,000 USD (far less than any Hollywood movie), and earned over 240 million dollars! It also started a wave of pseudo-documentary horror movies.

The Blair Witch Project was so scary because it seemed so real. It used its genre, documentary, to add to watchers' fear. Rather than showing a traditional, fictional narrative, the pseudo-documentary allowed viewers to pretend they were watching real events. And the scariest thing a horror movie can do is make you think it's real, right? Starting off real gets people frightened faster than waiting to get caught up in an obviously fictional narrative.

Since then, other movies have ridden the pseudo-documentary wave. The Paranormal Activity series all pretend to use only security camera footage and home movies to tell the story of a haunted. The Last Exorcism tells the story of a preacher documenting fake exorcisms who ends up confronting a real demon. Like The Blair Witch Project, the Paranormal Activity movies were cheap to make. The Last Exorcism cost less than two million dollars, much more than the others, but still nothing compared to big Hollywood films.

Pseudo-documentary horror films cut out the special effects and the big-name actors. They bring the fear home by making the characters seem just like the audience. And the horrors they face seem terribly real.