We had them going right up until those end credits rolled. We didn’t tell them exactly what we were watching, they sat down to join us…and after about half an hour, one of them turned to me and asked, her eyes wide, “Is this real?” I replied that yes, it absolutely was. It was fun watching them experience it for the first time - but not quite as much as when our host’s sister arrived home with a friend of hers, about 10 minutes into the film. I hadn’t told them too much about it, and they were completely caught up in The Blair Witch Project’s dark spell. We turned off all the lights and started the movie - and it cast its spell all over again. We got together one night at one of their houses, where he had a big TV room with one of the largest sets available at the time. So when a colleague of mine (again, no names, please) got ahold of a VHS screener of the movie, I asked if I could borrow it to share the experience with my gang. I had no idea it would eventually make its way to over 2,500 theaters several months later, and since I lived out in the suburbs, I didn’t know how many of my local friends would get to see it. Yet as powerful as the experience was, The Blair Witch Project still struck me as a film destined for art-house play rather than wide saturation release. Just to add to the evening’s unease factor, the elevators were slow that night, so a bunch of us made our way to the street via the narrow, semi-dark eight flights of stairs - looking over our shoulders all the way down. And when it was over, the first of the closing credits was greeted with the loudest collective “Whew” I’ve ever heard at a movie. One of my fellow journalists (whom I will not identify) sitting next to me was especially distraught he did everything but grab my arm as The Blair Witch Project mercilessly built its tension. You could feel the chill spread through all of us as the situation on screen became increasingly dire for our unfortunate trio, relieved only by the occasional gasp at some startling development or other. As we followed Heather, Josh and Michael into the woods near Burkittsville in search of a legendary witch whose evil influence proved to be all too real, that group of critics and other media folk came together as one terrified unit. What followed was one of the most memorable screenings in my many years of covering the horror beat.
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