more so than subsequent found footage, this movie takes advantage of how the form implies that the boundaries of its narrative are dictated by its victims. as a result, it focuses much more deeply than most horror movies on fear as an emotion and the ways it shows itself. the blair witch, the genesis of that fear, is just a cipher, but dressed up in enough specificity--the creepily meaningless iconography of the stick figure, the one physical description of her--to be interesting nonetheless. the ending maybe goes for verisimilitude over impact, but the movie is effective up until then. the woods look nice too.