A few weeks ago, our own Scott Von Doviak checked in with Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, the seemingly MIA directors of the 1999 sleeper hit The Blair Witch Project. But what of the film itself?
What made Blair Witch a hit?: The Blair Witch Project was the breakout hit of the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. This micro-budgeted, documentary-style horror movie came seemingly out of nowhere to scare the pants off the festival-hardened audience, and was promptly snapped up by Artisan Entertainment, a fledgling distributor looking for a hit. For months afterward, the Sundance buzz became deafening, as word of this mysterious indie — allegedly "the scariest movie ever" — began to spread. With the aid of an Internet-heavy campaign — fueled primarily by the film's then-groundbreaking Web site, which treated the film it advertised as a legitimate documentary, complete with backstory about the Blair Witch legend — word of mouth for Blair Witch was at its peak in time for the film's late-July release.
What happened?: Unfortunately for the film, the Internet giveth, and the Internet taketh away. Blair Witch rode the buzz to a rock-solid $30 million opening-weekend gross, on its way to a $140 million domestic take. However, no sooner had audiences seen the film en masse than the backlash began. Many complained that the film wasn't scary; others, that the advertising had been a bait-and-switch, tricking them into believing the events of the film were real. Still others were rendered nauseous by the movie's handheld camera work. That the film was released during the height of the postmodern horror subgenre (e.g. Scream) didn't help matters. Blair Witch's unconventional, un-ironic style made it ripe for cheap, easy satire, as in 2000's Scary Movie.
But perhaps the most basic reason for the film's waning popularity is the cyclical nature of the genre itself. Horror has a loyal fan base, but particular subgenres go in and out of fashion. The mini-wave of Blair Witch-inspired doc-style horror soon gave way to more elegant chillers, inspired by summer 1999's other horror sleeper, The Sixth Sense, which boasted not only a buzz-friendly twist but also didn't supposedly cause some audience members to vomit. The Blair Witch brand name had lost most of its luster by release of the 2000 sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (more on this later). 
Does Blair Witch still work?: Oh my, yes, although not quite as originally advertised. It's certainly scary, but most of its scares are psychological rather than visceral. Much of the film's effect comes from the fear that we may one day suddenly find ourselves lost, far from civilization, and ill-equipped to make our way home. In the film, the characters find themselves in precisely this situation, and their minds have already begun to unravel by the time the scares come. It might not contain many popcorn-spilling shocks, but long after more conventional horror movies fade from the memory, the slow-burn fright of Blair Witch lingers. It's a tough movie to shake.
In addition, Blair Witch's filming was ingenious. To begin with, Sanchez and Myrick didn't employ a full screenplay, instead mapping out a 35-page outline of Blair Witch lore for actors Heather Donohue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard to use as background, then trusting them to improvise on camera. The actors — all portraying aspiring filmmakers — were also tasked to operate the cameras and sound equipment themselves, giving their footage an un-polished feel that works to the film's advantage. 
By the time the cast went to shoot their scenes in the woods, the filmmakers had almost completely left them to their own devices. As the cast wandered through the woods shooting footage, the filmmakers followed at a distance, approaching their cast only at night while they slept, to leave fresh food and filming supplies, set up the film's memorably vague fright objects — stick figures, rock piles, a bundle of sticks of sticks containing a nasty surprise — for the next day's shoot, and to provide the scares that would awaken the cast from their slumber. By giving so much of the control of the film over to the cast, The Blair Witch Project has a verisimilitude that has yet to be surpassed in the faux-documentary genre.
