Payea and company have benefited from strong support from people in their own community, many of whom seem to understand this incident as a case of some basically good kids exercising poor judgment. "You know what this is about?" asks Georgia Westover, a resident of nearby Davison who helped to organize a candlelight vigil for the accused. "You know the expression, 'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned'? That's what this is, exactly." The line in the community runs that Taylor had a romantic interest in Payea and that when he rebuffed her, she took her revenge by turning the tape over to the cops.

Watching television footage of the April 6 candlelight vigil made me wonder whether it marked the first time in history a group of solid citizens had united to sing "Amazing Grace" in support of the creators of an amateur slasher movie. Westover and other members of the community are quick to point out that the accused have no criminal records. "They're filmmakers and artists and photographers and musicians," she says. "They're creative people who just thought that they would make a movie. You know, kind of like 'The Blair Witch Project.'"

Ah, yes, "The Blair Witch Project." In 1999, at the crest of the wave of "Blair Witch" buzz, some repercussions were clear. It was evident, for instance, that the entertainment industry and the viewing public would have to weather dozens of "Blair Witch" parodies. It was obvious that the world would have to endure at least one sequel that possessed only a fraction of its forebear's inventiveness; this requirement was fulfilled the following year with the cruddy "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2." A few people grasped the way that hitching the some of the protocols of Dogme 95 -- the manifesto of naturalistic filmmaking trumpeted by Lars von Trier, Harmony Korine and other artsy types -- to the horror genre had yielded tremendous commercial dividends. But no one quite apprehended the degree to which "Blair Witch" had anticipated and helped to usher in new entertainment trend; call it the drama of real suffering.

Realness was the currency of "Blair Witch." From its poker-faced, just-the-facts Internet marketing campaign to actress Heather Donahue's terrified, tear-streaked climactic monologue, the film's ace in the hole was its determination never to let on that it was a stunt. This refusal ran so far against the grain of the genre -- best typified by the endless self-referentiality of the "Scream" movies -- that it felt like a kind of revelation.

That summer of "Blair Witch," let us recall, was also the summer of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Of course, Regis' show has become a dull copy of itself, so much so that it's hard to recollect how much fun "Millionaire" was in the summer of '99. But remember the spectacle of those first contestants, the way their sheer ordinariness rubbed up against Regis' twinkling celebrity and the high-tech spareness of the set? Remember their agony as they struggled for some clue deep inside themselves, something that could point them toward which country had won the most soccer World Cups, or which president had served in between Grover Cleveland's terms?

Prior to "Millionaire" and "Blair Witch," reality TV (such as it was) was dominated by the MTV/Bunim-Murray models of "The Real World" and "Road Rules," shows that were conceived as unscripted cinema-vérité soap operas. Petty squabbles and the occasional three-way might have given the shows their entertainment value, but the series' approach toward their subjects was fundamentally generous. However, the trajectory of reality TV since 1999 has adopted an increasingly sadistic arc. The first wave of shows, such as "Survivor" and "Big Brother," still essentially worked the soap opera angle, but they were spiked with challenges designed to exhaust or break down its subjects, such as eating bugs or living in forced confinement with insufferable housemates. The most recent shows, from NBC's "Fear Factor" to MTV's "Fear" to the absurd (and mercifully canceled) John McEnroe-hosted "The Chair," all have one thing in mind: emotional torture. Even that guiltiest of guilty pleasures, Fox's "Temptation Island," gets its mileage less from an emotional attachment to its characters than from the deeply personal abjection of its subjects in the face of infidelity. If we watch these shows, it's to see real people really suffer.

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