Movies that are . . . actually scary?

Re: Blair Witch, I know I've mentioned before that some friends and I got free passes to a preview screening, knowing absolutely nothing about the movie going in, and I can confirm that that's the best way to see it. The entire audience just sat quietly in their seats for an unusually long time after it ended. It's the one time I recall being legitimately frightened at the movies.

(The effect was, eh, considerably diminished upon a second viewing.)

I refuse to believe that Blair Witch isn't really scary.

Yeah I’ve told my story before but my friend who was an NYU film student brought over the VHS and before watching it he didn’t even know if it was a documentary or what. It was like oh this is some thing that’s been copied around. We were terrified.

I thought it was proper scary

scared the shit out of me

so strange that Blair Witch was able to do what it did. you couldn't really pull that sort of stunt off these days where you convince a significant amount of people that what they are watching is in fact real

I could imagine something like that turning up on youtube and people debating whether it is real

There was one made in 2007, by a Britisher in fact, "Louise Paxton"

The Blair Witch crew were really canny wrt promotion. IIRC, the actors' IMDB profiles were modified for an entire year to show them missing? I can't imagine a working actor giving the okay on that nowadays.

That could easily have the opposite effect too, though. Personally, I wasn't aware of any of the promotional stuff and hadn't heard anything about the movie beforehand. Had I known that there were people claiming that THIS IS TOTALLY A REAL TAPE, the skeptical asshole in me probably would have kicked in and ruined the experience.

I would love a Criterion or equivalent Blair Witch release with docs and stuff detailing their efforts

As OL, points out: The Blair Witch marketing was INDEED super grassrooted and heavily, heavily seeded for longggg-game. There were a ton of early websites and other red herrings and deliberate misinformation planted all around.

I saw it on opening day lol that's how much I had bought in to the hype. Stood in line for 2 hours at an OLDE urban single-screen theater. I brought the newspaper (!) with me in line, it was the day after JFK Jr. died in his plane crash, so that was notable.