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Was the Blair Witch Project the last great horror film?
- alansmitheebk 11y agoFuck no. That movie sucked.
- malux85 11y agoI've only just started getting into horror, can you give some suggestions? :)
- reactor4 11y agoI suggest Sinister: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1922777/?ref_=nv_sr_1 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1922777/?ref_=nv_sr_1
- HaloZero 11y agoAlien & Aliens The Orphanage The Shining The Exorcist Dawn of the Dead The Fly The Thing Ringu Halloween Silence of the Lambs Rosemary Baby The Others Should see but not necessarily must: Village of the Damned
- catshirt 11y agoi exercise my own blatant disregard for syntax and grammar rules but christ man, try a comma.
- derekp7 11y agoI would add Phantasm to the list. Not necessarily the sequels, just the original.
- mrob 11y agoPeople have recommended The Cabin in the Woods, and it's a great movie, but I suggest you hold off watching it until you've seen a lot of other horror movies. It relies on you being familiar with the cliches and genre conventions for it to work.
- k__ 11y agoWell, you could watch it first and see how many horror-movies are devoid of creativity ;)
- thomnottom 11y agoI agree. Great movie, but you miss a lot if you don't know the history.
- strictnein 11y agoEvent Horizon
- kozhevnikov 11y agohttps://www.reelscary.com/ https://www.reelscary.com/
- thomnottom 11y agoI don't know true classic horror, but would absolutely suggest John Carpenter's Halloween and The Thing as starting points. I still view them as two of the greatest I've ever seen. I would also put Alien up there (horror/sci-fi). For recent ones, It Follows and The Ba-ba-dook were phenomenal. As for Blair Witch... when I saw it in theaters, people were literally laughing at it.
- Raphmedia 11y agoBetteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
- dhimes 11y agoI disagree. That movie was groundbreaking for its style and budget.
- gnaritas 11y agoOnly the style really counts; being massively profitable due to the low budget doesn't make it a great movie. And as to the "lost footage" style, I've always disliked that style and find it ruins any movie it's used in. Shaking cameras are not a feature, they're a bug that was fixed long ago.
- dhimes 11y agoWhile I respect your opinion on the fitness of the style for telling a story, that particular movie is the one that launched the style into its current popularity. Right or wrong, when you change the direction of your field you get major props.
- gnaritas 11y agoOf course, that's why I said only the style really counts. I don't like the style, but it did inspire a slew of followers so it gets respect for a distinctive new style. You just can't count the budget as a reason to call something a groundbreaking horror movie, style yes, budget, no.
- dhimes 11y agoDisagree there also. Bringing the budget down lowers the barrier to entry for other players. Budget, yes.
- gnaritas 11y agoThat's a business achievement attractive to filmmakers and has nothing to do with the classic'ness of the film to moviegoers. No one is going to do a review on a film and say "wow, you know what made that a great movie, the budget". Anyway, I don't care, I've already talked about this bad movie more than I ever care to. I don't mind to never hear of it again.
- thom 11y agoBlair Witch Project came out when I was at university, and I saw it at the cinema with a bunch of friends. It later transpired that at least two of them genuinely believed it was real. In a way, I have always been envious of their gullibility, because it must have been an _incredibly_ intense experience. As it was, I still thought it was pretty good, and an incredible achievement for the budget.
- nsxwolf 11y agoI had the misfortune of seeing it with a theatre audience that laughed at everything they saw. It really killed it for me.
- curun1r 11y agoThat was one film where piracy offered an experience that the legitimate film experience couldn't have. I worked a swing shift, so my coworkers and I would have a bunch of free time at work and a coworker of mine had gotten into downloading movies from Hotline to fill the time. When he downloaded BWP, all we knew about it was that it was a file name 'Blair_Witch_Project.mpg' on some internet-connected server. There had been no publicity for it and it wasn't released in any theater in the area. When I watched it again in the theatre, it wasn't nearly as gripping as it was on the 17" monitor we used to watch it the first time. Plus, the lack of a steadicam made it actually better on a much smaller screen. All in all, I don't agree with the premise of the article. I'm not even sure I'd call BWP good. It was creative, but I don't know that it worked without the uncertainty that surrounded my first viewing. Also, for me, there was a much better horror film that came out later that year called 'Stir of Echoes', so even if BWP is considered great, it's not, for me, the last great horror film.
- newobj 11y agoHardly. 28 Days Later / Shutter Island / Donnie Darko / Let The Right One In / Jeepers Creepers / The Ring / Drag Me To Hell / Saw / The Host / The Others / Cabin In The Woods / It Follows / ...etc
- emsy 11y agoI never thought of Donnie Darko as a horror movie. Care to elaborate?
- strictnein 11y agoAnd Shutter Island. Good movie, but not in any way a horror movie.
- newobj 11y agoWould you consider The Shining a horror movie? I seem them as very much in the same vein. The Shining of course, being the better of the two :)
- strictnein 11y agoI would, but it's borderline. The supernatural element of it pushes it over the edge for me.
- mrob 11y agoI've watched a lot of horror movies and none of them came anywhere close to scaring me. It's too easy to remember that they're not real. Donnie Darko however has scenes I'd call "philosophically scary", and knowing it's not real does nothing to lessen the impact. Despite not being officially horror I found it more horrifying than any horror movie.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoWhat do you mean? Isn't it just a time-travel movie?
- angdis 11y agoNO! BWP was a solid innovative film that inspired a whole sub-genre of horror films. It was great, but there have been really outstanding horror films since then. I am thinking, in particular, of "It Follows". THAT was a revelation of what can be possible in horror.
- DarkTree 11y agoIt Follows, along with a handful of others (The Strangers, the Ring, the first Paranormal Activity), was the first well done horror movie I've seen since the BWP. I guess it comes down to what scares you personally. For me, it is much more about the atmosphere that the movie creates, that often borders on weird and uncomfortable, and human. Of course, the Shining is also a great example of this. The slow slip into insanity in a grand, isolated hotel in a blizzard does way more to evoke that weird feeling that lingers after the movie ends. It confuses that so many directors keep pushing the same style of horror movie out, when they consistently get poor reviews. Are all directors scared by the same exact themes?
- nommm-nommm 11y agoCannibal Holocaust was probably the first "found footage" horror film and predates Blair Witch Project by almost 2 decades.
- nkozyra 11y agoParent comment doesn't say that BW was the first, just that it inspired a bunch of movies. Which is far more true of it than Cannibal Holocaust.
- angdis 11y agoYou're right, of course, it DID predate BWP. But it did not inspire a genre. Perhaps because so few people saw Cannibal Holocaust when it first released? It was a film that gained an audience gradually, on video for many years after it came out.
- strictnein 11y agoI think it depends. When my sister saw it, it was very early on, prior to any pub or wide release, at a festival (or something) were it was presented as basically a true found film/documentary. She called me almost immediately after seeing it and pestered me for months to go watch it, presenting it as truly great. When I saw it, I knew it was fake, had read about the making of it, etc. We were laughing at it in the theater (especially the "found my cigarettes" part). So, while a little scary in parts (especially that ending), it wasn't anything special to us. We still point to Event Horizon as our favorite horror movie, partly because we didn't know it was going to be what it was. We thought it was more of a space exploration thriller.
- milankragujevic 11y agoI'd rate Event Horizon as the scariest thing I saw in my life, mainly because the first and only time I saw it was when I was 7 years old.
- phpnode 11y agoI had a similar experience, no other film scared me before or since, but event horizon was terrifying
- thomnottom 11y agoI saw it in college. With the lights on. And nobody wanted to go back to their own dorm rooms afterward.
- hguant 11y agoI first saw it a few years back, and it ranks with Prince of Darkness as one of the scariest things I've ever seen. I think the transition from Lovecraftian "cosmic horror" to modern jump scares is one of the biggest shames of modern cinema. It's easy to copy gore or other ick factor stuff that are part of the classic great horror flicks, but getting the essential creepiness of The Omen, or the alienation of Rosemary's Baby takes talent.
- GFischer 11y agoI think my brother still hates me... first time in our lives we were alone (I think I was 13 or 14, my brother 11 or 12), dark stormy night with lightning, my father was going out for a few hours, so of course, I got to choose a (VHS) movie.. it was Event Horizon. He couldn't sleep for days (I had a nightmare but I could sleep), my father was SO mad.
- samstave 11y agoWatch "Rec"
- lost_name 11y agoWhile the title is obviously geared for sensationalism, I think the question the article is actually asking is whether or not a gimmick (for lack of a better term) like a documentary style horror movie, and having people go in the theater not knowing if it was real or not, still exists. As the author points out, it's silly in retrospect but at the time there was genuine confusion about it for audiences, and the way the movie was produced furthered the illusion. That question is more interesting than arguing about whether or not you liked the film.
- thomnottom 11y agoYes, it's a shame that they went for sensationalism. I really wish the Blair Witch Project had worked (for me) because it was an excellent idea. Unfortunately it just came out as sloppy, amateurish, and boring. The "big reveal" at the end simply elicited an "Oh, that makes sense" from me. But it's probably the only film that successfully tiptoed that line between reality and film.
- ojbyrne 11y agoThe Babadook.
- trimbo 11y agoCame here to add this. It's the best in years.
- jstalin 11y agoBlair Witch was so terrible, I don't know why anyone considers it a good movie. The characters were all so stupid that I wanted them to die just so I could leave the theater.
- Wonderdonkey 11y agoJu-On?
- VOYD 11y agoYes.
- bayer_rggb 11y agoI don't know if it counts as horror, but Ex-machina freaked me out. The movie is so good on so many levels. I was always skeptical about AI and what it could lead to, but this movie makes you think about the morality of AI-beings.
- nextweek2 11y agoHitchcocks The Birds was: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0056869/ http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0056869/ Scary isn't what you see on screen, it's what you carry with you the rest of your life. I still stiffen up every time I area flock of birds gathering on telephone wire. If the birds turned on us, we'd be dead.
- spikej 11y agoOr watching Alive (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106246/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106246/) as a child on your first time ever on an airplane o_0
- mrob 11y agoMaybe it was more effective when it was first released, but I watched it for the first time less than a year ago and it seemed more like a bad comedy. If birds really did turn on humans (already stretching suspension of disbelief because there's no reason for them to do so) then they would win a few early victories at most. Birds couldn't stand up to modern weapons. And with no Geneva convention in play humans could use chemical etc. weapons against them. The birds wouldn't stand a chance.
- gotofritz 11y agoSurely Audition.