Unless you saw it in a theater when it came out, it's impact is completely lost

Very true. Back when it first came out, people were mostly positive about this movie. Over the years it lost its impact, due to all of the other(not as well done) found footage movies.This one is still the first and best of all of them most definitely.

True it was probably the craziest response to a movie since The Exorcist. People freaked when this first came out.

I saw it in theaters and have always thought it was an uninteresting borefest. Ineffective camping movie.

And it's Not even a True Story.

I saw it when it came out in the theaters, and I thought it was boring as hell then. The thing that made it such a success was the rumor going around that this was real found footage, and it was thus a true story. Smarter people knew better; real footage of an amateur film crew's tragic end might have been released to 20/20 or Dateline, or some news program, but it's not likely it would be released as a for-profit motion picture. Still, enough people bought into the idea that the movie was a whopping financial success.

It was still boring though. And the sad thing is it popularized the found footage format, which I hate. A couple of good stories, like "Chronicle" and "Apollo 18," which might have been great movies if shot as conventional films (because the basic stories are really interesting and have a lot of potential), are entirely unmemorable and do not bear rewatching because they are the off-putting found footage format, at least for me.

Speak for yourself. I watch this movie every year and still think it’s one of the best and scariest horror movies of all time.

Before the inevitable "You must not have seen many horror movies"

I’ve seen close to 2000.

I couldn't agree more. I saw it on opening night with my older sister and two of my friends. We went into the theater thinking that this was 100% real found footage filmed by three kids that went missing in the woods, and thinking that it was being released in theaters like a documentary, as part of the missing persons effort to find them. In retrospect, yeah, we were naive, but in fairness their marketing campaign for this movie was GENIUS. Remember, this was in the first few years when people having computers with dial-up internet in their homes was just starting to become widespread, and the internet was in its infancy. And there was no found footage movie genre at the time.

The trailer, and all the promotional materials out there all linked curious people to a website that looked like a legit missing persons campaign. There were missing posters, childhood photos of the three actors, interviews with the three main characters' "family members," interviews with townspeople from Burkittsville talking about the witch legend, interviews with "law enforcement" who had conducted endless searches for the missing kids. There were also pages of text and drawings from supposedly old books documenting the legend of Elly Kedward (the witch). There was grainy, black-and-white footage of a jailhouse interview with Rustin Parr, the hermit who lived in the house in the woods and was supposedly tried and executed for murdering children of Blair and claimed the witch made him do it. On and on and on. The whole thing was extremely convincing at the time.

Going in thinking this was all real, this remains the most terrifying experience I've ever had with a movie, and millions of others had the same experience. It was a phenomenon.

So true! All the hype when it was first out and sitting in the dark with the big screen and sound system, it was quite an experience.

However, I'll never forget the session I attended where one person got such a fright that they threw up their box of popcorn and we all had popcorn raining down on us. Unforgettable and hilarious in the moment.