"The Blair Witch Project"

The palpable sense of dread, which builds in a slow, steady crescendo throughout, is exacerbated by the film's utter lack of cinematic foreshadowing -- there's no "here comes the bad thing" music, no telltale establishing shots of a hiding figure that compel us to shout, "Don't go in there!" at the screen. Instead, we have a one-way march toward the unknown, a race to see what encroaches first: the elements, the enigmatic evil that haunts the woods or the group's own increasing paranoia. It's fitting that "The Blair Witch Project" should open the same week as Stanley Kubrick's final film, since it shares something psychologically -- if not stylistically -- with "The Shining." Both films explore the unnerving possibility that perhaps the worst thing supernatural powers can do is to sit back and play with our heads, to let our minds create a hell of their own. When Heather observes, "It's all around us," she doesn't notice that "it" is very much inside them as well.

For a cinema viriti horror story to work, the cast has to make you forget it's acting, a feat that Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard -- in particular Donahue -- accomplish with an eerie agility. "Method" filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez made "Blair Witch" by having the cast go into the woods and camp for a week, giving them only rudimentary information on what was going to happen each day. It's a concept that makes Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" boot camp sound like Club Med, but the results speak for themselves: What we see on the screen are three people who look genuinely scared out of their minds, proving that fear isn't manifested only in shrieking, slasher-flick bursts. Sure, Heather can scream like a banshee, but she also shows the nuances of fear in subtler, more unsettling ways.

In the soon-to-be-famous scene in the tent, the camera is uncomfortably tight on her nose and right eye as she tries to calmly apologize for everything that's occurred. Her voice quivers, her eyes leak tears and she croaks out what she seems to truly believe is her final message ("I love you, Mom ...") as she helplessly waits for the horror to escalate. And escalate it does, building to an excruciatingly slow crescendo, and leading ultimately to the most memorably disturbing final image in a movie since the 1988 Dutch thriller "The Vanishing."

"The Blair Witch Project" is not a perfect film, and there are times when the viewer may ardently wish for less setup and quicker payoffs. And despite the movie's realism, there are significant and frustrating holes in logic: Why do the young makers of a documentary on the Blair Witch spend so little time actually talking about her? Why does Heather pack a book called "How to Stay Alive in the Woods" and then never use it? And why, even when they're running away in terror, do they take their cameras everywhere?

Despite these occasional lapses, "The Blair Witch Project" still emerges as a fascinating, unforgettable mystery. The film leaves us, like the filmmakers, abandoned in the woods, with no one there to save us. And Heather's terrified "What was that?" is up to us to answer. Days after, you may still be replaying certain scenes in your head, puzzling over their exact significance.

In what may be a first in cross-media storytelling, the movie's creators, sensing the intense curiosity it might provoke, have offered some ingenious alternative sources of further information. There's a spooky-in-its-own-right Web site full of "evidence" from the case, and a Sci Fi network mockumentary on the mockumentary that gives both the background of the legend and a postscript on the investigation of the students' disappearance, with additional materials (including a comic book) to follow.

Even without the supplemental story lines, though, "The Blair Witch Project" stands on its own, the most inventive and genuinely frightening horror movie to appear in years. "Scream" may have revitalized the genre by giving it wry, self-referential wit, but "Blair Witch" does it by proving that there's nothing scarier than looking fear in the face. It is, quite simply, a movie you have to see, and preferably with a friend. Because this is a film you're going to need to talk about when it's over, and afterward you definitely won't want to walk home alone.

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