"The Blair Witch Project" exploited our taste for cruelty so artfully that it made its creators' reputations and handed them lucrative careers in the most glamorous industry in the world. The success of the film helped writer-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez cement what we might call the legend of the Hollywood outsider: Kids come from nowhere to astonish the industry with their taut, gripping, cheaply made and hugely profitable genre pieces. They took their place in a recent lineage that includes Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith, though it's instructive to note that, unlike their predecessors, Myrick and Sanchez, having made some of the greatest virtues of necessity in movie history, found themselves creatively adrift when that necessity ceased to exist.

The drama of real suffering, inaugurated by "Blair Witch" and amplified by television, has effectively raised the bar of what constitutes viable entertainment. And so we reach a place where maybe/sorta/kinda kidnapping this girl you know and pretending to bury her alive constitutes a not entirely unlikely means of establishing a filmmaking career.

Make no mistake: The creators of "Blair Witch," or even "Fear Factor," aren't responsible for what happened to Danielle Taylor, any more than the creators of "The Basketball Diaries" or Doom II are responsible for the Columbine murders. But as this case demonstrates, the relationship between popular culture and daily life is far more plastic than is admitted by reductive theories that label entertainment exclusively as either the symptoms or the causes of youthful crimes and misdemeanors. Payea and company bear full culpability for whatever injuries Taylor has endured, but there's no question that those events are largely unthinkable without the models provided by pop culture. That's not an argument for censorship; it's a recognition that new forms of entertainment require new kinds of responsibilities from their audiences -- especially when those audiences have the technology at hand to go out and make their own entertainment.

What's utterly missing from Payea's tape is any sense of human responsibility. It's indicative of these guys' condescension toward Taylor that, at the end of the tape, one of them can't quite remember her name. Also missing is even the barest conception of filmmaking craft. It would make a better and thornier story to be able to say that, despite a willful disregard for Taylor's dignity, the movie represented some kind of artistic achievement, or at least a halfway amusing prank. It's neither. At first glance, it's tempting to group Payea and Cockerill with Mark Borchardt, the hapless subject of Chris Smith's documentary "American Movie," who shares both their northern Midwest geography and their devotion to horror flicks. But Smith's film demonstrated nothing so much as Borchardt's fanatical devotion to his calling, and the clips of Borchardt's film "Coven," to our limitless surprise, possess a distinctive and undeniable aesthetic.

No such vision is evident in Payea's tape, which suggests the quickest and shoddiest attempts at sensationalism imaginable. Payea's attorney insists that there was a script for the film, which has since vanished. It's hard to see how the rambling, repetitive series of threats to Taylor's life and admonitions that she share her feelings as she's confronted with her "fate" could constitute any kind of script. I picture the script more as a series of "good lines" scrawled on some legal pad, to be consulted when things got slow to keep the proceedings lively. The action in the early going is slack and unconvincing, either as drama or as prank. It must be said that Taylor's noncommittal responses in those early scenes tend to bolster the defense's case; her affectless, sluggish demeanor suggests a person going along with someone else's lame joke more than a woman who believes herself in real danger.

Once the group is in the car, things get queasier. Cockerill holds a knife to Taylor's throat, his eyes glowing creepily, thanks to the camera's "night vision" setting. (A complete and total devotion to this eye-glowing night-vision effect is the movie's sole technical distinction.) Taylor at this point is evidently scared, and given her apparent lack of acting ability in the prior scenes, I'm inclined to read her fear as genuine. And she may have had good reason to be afraid; despite the defense's repeated illustration of the Scotch tape along the serrated edge of the knife, Cockerill frequently holds the knife at her throat point-first. One bad bump or sudden brake on the wintry rural Michigan road, and Taylor's looking at an accidental tracheotomy.

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