A few weeks later, I brought the movie with me on a trip with some friends to a cabin in the woods upstate. At this point I was still terrified by the movie, but enjoyed the experience enough to subject others to it. And they were outraged by how scared they got. One girl called it "emotional porn" and was furious at the filmmakers for having made something so completely harrowing (and she's no anti-horror puritan--she was just scared half to death).

And then a few weeks after that was the premiere in theatres. This was a very different experience--better in some ways (watching a crowd of strangers have the bloody bejesus scared out of them was fun; some of the more grating lines of dialogue, ones that didn't ring true, were cut; and of course the sounds from around the tent were now fully audible), worse in others (the disappointed/pissed off moviegoers who booed; the fact that the movie really does work better as an unlabeled nth-generation bootleg than as a big-screen projection).

The main difference, though, involved the ending. This is a spoiler, so far as it goes: The final image consists of Mike standing in a corner. In the version I originally saw, no explanation was ever given for what the hell was going on here. None. So either he's dead, and something has propped him up, or he's a live, and---uuhhhhhh GOD I don't even want to think about it. However, in the theatrical version, a man-on-the-street interview was added to the collection of such snippets at the film's beginning, in which a local claims that the serial killer once inspired/possessed by the Witch would take kids into the basement two at a time, and make one face the corner while he killed the other. So we switch from a nameless horror that I'm still trying to scrape out of my brain to a "hey lookout she's over there!!!" kinda moment. It's a lousy tradeoff, as even the actress Heather Donahue seemed to notice--though she didn't specify what she was talking about, she feistily pointed out on Leno that week that she and the other two actors had shot everything in the film themselves "except one thing." She wasn't happy about that one thing, let me tell you. Neither was I, but so what? I'd done without it, to my everlasting horror and delight. And I've never gotten around to buying the official, DVD version of the film. That grainy tape is, for better or for worse, and mainly for better, I think, the way I will watch this movie.

Are there movies that are, as a whole, scarier than this one? Yes, I'd probably have to say so. The Shining, and probably The Exorcist, and maybe even Texas Chain Saw and The Ring are packed wall-to-wall with terrifying images and relentless ante-upping horror. Blair Witch has sticks and stones. But it relies on the strength of its stars--three humans, and their collective fear. If you see it in the right way, at the right time, with the right people, that fear overtakes you. And you're there in the basement, standing in the corner.