31 horror films you need to watch this October

The Blair Witch Project

The Plot

Largely considered to be one of the pioneers of found-footage horror, The Blair Witch Project begins with three film students heading out into the woods near Burkittsville Maryland to create a documentary about the Blair Witch, a local legend surrounding a series of strange and violent crimes which took place in the area. The locals give them all the typical warnings: that the woods are haunted, that people have gone missing in the woods, that some have even shown up ritually murdered—the three students eat it up, of course, before setting off into the woods themselves. The people who actually heed the creepy warnings about not going into the haunted woods are never the subject of horror movies, after all.

As they get deeper into the woods, they begin to see signs of another presence around them; rock cairns around their camp in the morning that weren’t there at night, strange stick figures in the trees, and inexplicable noises from the trees around them at night. By the time they finally realize they need to get out of there, it is far too late.

The Breakdown

The Blair Witch Project is a perfect example of how horror doesn’t actually need to show you anything scary in order to be absolutely terrifying. It starts by feeding you a few sparse yet evocative facts about the Blair Witch and the surrounding forest; it prods you with little details that become more and more frightening as the movie goes on, until the fear mounts to its ultimate and terrifying conclusion. The low-budget and hand-held format has been done to death afterward, but in many ways The Blair Witch Project did it best.

The Scare Factor

This is one of those movies that will either not work for you at all, or scare the ever-loving crap out of you. It’s slow at times, but also unbearably tense; the awful inevitable build and the light hand it takes with its subject mean that the worst fear of all is often in your own imagination.