CELLULOID FOUND IN A BOTTLE: The Blair Witch Project.

I watched the Blair Witch Project - hereinafter known as BWP - whilst flying over West Africa. I mention this partly to show off, but also viewing a movie on a postcard-sized screen on the back of an inclined passenger seat seems the ultimate test of its pulling power. BWP passed this benchmark brilliantly, and given its home movie ethos maybe the filmmakers would have approved of this snatched form of screening as more appropriate to their particular video diary style of film, instead of the artifice of the local multiplex. It's a deeply effective chiller which burns into the memory, so that images from the film build in the mind like castles of clouds in its aftermath. The movie scared me shitless, to the extent that I was quite unable to touch my BA continental breakfast when it arrived at dawn.

BWP is a highly original take on a form which exists in literature, witness Poe's Manuscript Found in a Bottle and Cameron McCabe's stunning The Face on the Cutting Room Floor. Such narratives play with form, postulating a mystery manuscript often in the form of a diary or first person account supposedly discovered by chance and published in an edited state, with a footnote declaring the fate of its author unknown, presumed dead. It's a clever device and has a strangely haunting effect upon the reader, as well as lending, like the pseudo-documentary, a powerful if spurious air of authenticity. BWP updates this genre - for I think it can reasonably be claimed a genre - and here we have a mix of 16mm film, Hi8 videotape, and DAT audio recordings instead of a manuscript.

This is a smart idea, reflecting the greater accessibility of camera equipment, especially the small-format portable camera. Now everyone is a filmmaker, and the movie caught the second nature ease the young have with moviemaking, even given that the protagonists are film students making an investigative-style documentary about a local urban legend, the Blair Witch myth. The camcorder culture is not an innocent advance upon the home-movie, but the era of the spy camera where suburbanites film their neighbours making love on the bathroom floor. Everyone is Nick Bloomfield with his phallic microphone. Of course, this voyeurism was caught long ago by Michael Powell in his insidious little movie, Peeping Tom, released six months before Psycho in 1960. Said by some to actually be about Hitchcock, Peeping Tom depicts a serial killer cameraman filming his murders as he commits them, the camera appropriately adapted to become the murder weapon - a pretty diabolical concept from screenwriter Leo Marks.

BWP succeeds on another level, in making the filming seem ordinary and unexceptional, just as a matter of course, random, simply what people do like taking holiday snaps. Yet this ultimately becomes the material of the movie, the seemingly raw footage shot by the students, the edited assembly comprising the entire film up until their projected although unconfirmed demise right at the end. This is a wonderfully rich notion, with a built-in foreshadowing factor, refreshingly original and quirky, far away from megabuck budgets and big stars, free of that plastic Hollywood look, engrossing in its technique as much as its narrative. It's rewarding to see something so starkly different coming out of American cinema and which succeeded so well at the capricious old Box Office.

The pseudo-documentary approach is not new, quite old hat in fact. It's been at the centre of many a media row, usually as the consequence of nervous television executives, with films such as The War Game and Death of a Princess. Directors as varied as Ken Loach, Peter Watkins, Mike Leigh, Oliver Stone, Gillo Pontecorvo and many others have invariably sought to make their dramas have the grainy look of documentaries. That's always been the issue, deceiving the viewing public as to the status of the material - is this drama or documentary, is it really real? Leading the gullible astray, pretending it's actuality footage when the images are cleverly crafted hand-held cinéma vérité giving the impression of accidental shooting but in fact carefully planned and orchestrated to create that effect, the art that conceals art.

BWP does the same for the camcorder age. It's a terrific film, possibly even a great one, and implies a challenge to conventional filmmaking not only in its simplicity and economy, but also in the way it plays as a film. No studied imagery, no complex composition, an absence of overt symbolism, missing mise-en-scène. It's shot by unknowns, actors playing film students, even if under controlled and detailed briefings from the co-writer-directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. Film Studies courses would be threatened with redundancy if BWP were ever to become the filmic norm. No more of those pretentious BFI tomes on signs and meaning, even though film academics are hugely adaptable and inventive with their jargon. BWP brings ideas of what film is right back down to earth. Given the improvised, collaborative nature of the movie, perhaps we might even see an end to the pedantic auteur theory, even to ghastly wastes of semiology.

The movie's major cinematic forebear is John Boorman's masterpiece, Deliverance, here cleverly contemporised by filtering the story through the camera-eye viewpoints of the protagonists. The camera is not merely a witness, but being operated by human hand muddles the action through confusion and fear, so that camera movement becomes reflective of the emotional impulses of the characters. At times the camera itself becomes a character in the film, with a life of its own. Doubtless BWP will spawn many imitators, but the vérité look is harder to achieve than is often imagined, not simply being a question of jerking the camera around and making the audience dizzy. One problem the movie doesn't quite solve is why the camera continues to roll in situations where it would seem unlikely. Heather is made out to be an obsessive filmer, it is her project, but this wears thin after awhile, and looks the contrivance it is.

More of a psychological thriller than a horror film, BWP functions on the slowburn, and the film is occasionally tedious, with studentish 'fucks' and 'shits' over-populating the improvised dialogue. However, this makes the grip of the film all the more intense when the screws are gradually applied. The measured build-up, the amelioration of small incident into major threat and unseen danger, works potently because it is left to the audience to imagine. Little actual physical horror is shown. Most is skilfully suggested and implied, utilizing that old rule-of-thumb quickly learnt by Hitchcock, that what we conjure in our minds is far more horrific than anything that can be shown on screen.

It's wrong to pick out individuals and fete them, but I'll do it anyway. Heather Donahue dominates the movie and binds it together. Her performance is quite exceptional and I have never seen such a gut-wrenching portrait of total fear which, towards the end of the film, enters the realms of mental collapse. An astonishing achievement, which also adds tremendous tension to the film, that scratchy hysteria blistering away on the soundtrack. I shall never forget those final screams. The realism of Donahue's responses greatly underscores the terror produced by this remarkable movie.

John Foster