The Blair Witch Project 1999

Hot take: the 2016 version is better. I know The Blair Witch Project is historically important for pioneering and popularizing the found footage style, and I can respect what it accomplished for the genre. But judging it purely by my experience watching it today? I was bored as hell. So much of the runtime feels like shouting, yapping, blaming each other, crying, getting lost, then repeating the same cycle again. And then the ending comes. After all that buildup, the camera drops and... that’s it? I understand that the ambiguity and lack of explanation are supposed to make it disturbing, but emotionally, it gave me almost nothing. I was sitting there wondering if I had somehow missed something. I’ve already seen later films take this formula and give me stronger scares, bigger payoffs, and more inventive uses of the camera.