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At one point, Heather breaks down crying at the enormity of the realisation that her death will likely be drawn-out, painful, and ruinous.
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The shaky, handheld camerawork and low-resolution footage root us firmly in the characters’ perspective, and we feel their minds unspooling as they confront the unlikelihood of them ever escaping with their lives. The three characters’ gradual realisation of their own inevitable doom is documented on two cameras.
Blair witch project real footage serial#
Whether their tormentors are human or paranormal in nature, either a local serial killer or the monstrous Blair Witch, is left uncertain. They begin to feel helpless and disoriented. They hear unsettling noises outside their tent at nighttime. They find piles of stones and hanging stick figures haunting their journey. When three film students - Heather (Heather Donahue), Josh (Joshua Leonard) and Mike (Michael Williams) - venture into a Maryland forest to shoot a documentary about the titular folklore legend, they find themselves lost and preyed on by unseen forces. Horror like The Blair Witch Project (1999). This is a horror of atmosphere and gradually building terror, horror that implies terrifying things rather than flat-out showing them. The most unsettling horror, however, makes you think something is hiding without ever showing any evidence of it. But in these examples, there always was something hiding in the background: the directors had placed figures there to unnerve us. The horror that affected me most has capitalised on this fear by hiding unsettling and blurry figures in the background, such as in Lake Mungo (2008) or The Haunting of Hill House (2018). Even after the game finished, I’d continue to anxiously scan for mysterious persons when I walked home in the dark or saw a scary movie. I would scour over the dark images of the forest, terrified I might spot that shifting demon in the periphery of my torchlight. Yet, as a nervous fourteen-year-old who avoided all things horror, I found it devastatingly scary. There was nothing innovative or complex about the way Slender scared you. You know you always have company and need to get as far away from it as possible. The more you look at Slender Man, the closer he appears the next time. He is a pale, featureless creature with long, handless arms and a scruffy suit who haunts the forest and appears at various distances partially concealed behind trees. Slender was a survival horror video game where the player finds themselves in a dark forest equipped with only a flashlight and one goal - evade the eponymous Slender Man. We drew the curtains, huddled around the laptop and started playing Slender. I was a young teenager, and spent an afternoon of my holiday subjecting myself to the new viral craze with two friends. The most scared I’ve ever been was during the summer of 2012.
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