"On October 21, 1994, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams hiked into the Black Hills Forest to shoot a documentary film on a local legend called 'The Blair Witch,' and were never seen again. One year later, their footage was found."

o reads the introduction to what promises to be one of the most controversial films of the summer season, "The Blair Witch Project." Already the subject an official web site -- and dozens more seem to be appearing every day -- and a torrent of news articles, the film managed to creep into last year's Sundance Film Festival where it reportedly left audiences shaken and "ashen faced." Written and produced by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez who spend a paltry $23,000 on the 87-minute film, "The Blair Witch Project" was immediately grabbed by a distributor for $1.2 million.

   Since then, there seems to be no end in sight to the speculation and questions raised about the film. "Is the scare of the summer real?" asked a headline in Entertainment Weekly online. The reviews in USA TODAY and elsewhere were obtuse, and we are informed that "Blair itself pretends to be not a movie but a true account pieced together from raw footage left behind after the threesome vanished..." Odeon Films.Com suggests that this screen work is one "Brilliantly blurring the lines between fact and fiction," that along with its "sheer cinematic ingenuity, urgency and invention," The Blair Witch Project "is the firsthand account of three student filmmakers who venture into Maryland's remote Black Forest to discover the truth about the mythic Blair Witch."

   The Project web site, which has received over 11 million visits since going on line, perpetuates this fiction -- or could it really be fact? -- by including film clips, a historical timeline, photos, biographies and other material. None of this serves to answer the skeptic's question, though, "Is any of this real?" Nor did the Sci-Fi Channel provide any definitive answers last Monday night, when it aired "Curse of the Blair Witch," produced in conjunction with the film's distributor and owner, Artisan Entertainment.

   First, there is the story line, which begins with one Elly Kedward who immigrated to America and settled in the town of Blair -- now the site of the very real community of Burkittsville, Maryland. Both the Project and Curse says that she is the basis of the Blair Witch, having been accused of witchcraft and tied to a tree and left to die during the deep of winter. The following year, children and other accusers mysteriously disappear, thus setting in motion a cycle of mysterious events and calamities that occur every fifty or sixty years. Blair is abandoned, but later reestablished when the railroad comes through the area. What follows is a cadence of mysterious drowning, abducted children, and the psychopathic murders of seven youngsters carried out by Rustin Parr. Police find the bodies disemboweled, and Parr insists that he was compelled to carry out the heinous crimes by "an old woman ghost" haunting the nearby woods. And there is even a rare book, "The Blair Witch Cult," detailing the exquisite horrors around Burkittsville, including Coffin Rock, where in the 1880s the naked and eviscerated bodies of a search team looking for missing children were discovered.

   On October 21, 1994, the Blair Witch mystery cycle again hits a periodic peak as the three students, intent on shooting their own documentary about the legend, hike into the woods never to be seen again. The following year, the footage is discovered in a strange entombment; the containers of film seem have materialized inside of the undisturbed soil of a mound surrounded by carefully arranged rocks. The film reveals the gradual deterioration of the students as they realize that they are hopelessly lost, and are taunted by mysterious sounds during the night -- their trek still documented on a High-8 handheld camera.

   "We aren't trying to pull a hoax here," declared Daniel Myrick, who admits that while the movie and website "look and feel real," he has also "revealed the process of how we made the movie." That is not readily apparent, though, even from the reviews which seem to avoid stating whether The Blair Witch Project is entirely a fabrication, or based on a kernel of factual events. Viewers will find this tension between fiction and reality enticing, yet disturbing in a way. Myrick and Sanchez have done for film what Orson Welles did for radio when he and the Mercury Theater aired "War of the Worlds" six decades ago. A critical ear, and certainly a familiarity with the H.G. Wells novel, would have revealed the fictional quality of the broadcast. But technology, and the inventiveness of The Blair Witch Project producers has rendered this film more immune; even a hardened skeptic might wonder, "Couldn't some of this at least be true?"

"The Blair Witch Project is the latest salute to postmodernism and the further blurring of cognitive lines separating the popular sense of reality from fantasy..."

   Sorting out any verisimilitude in Blair Witch is a daunting task, beginning with the fact that the producers employed a compelling technique, method filming. Myrick and Sanchez reportedly interviewed over 2000 candidates for the task of playing the student trio. The three were given a 30-page outline, and dispatched into the woods for several days, charged with shooting the footage of black-and-white film. This cinematic verite telegraphs viewers the eventual fate of the students; it also carries us into the action itself, almost as participants rather than static viewers.

   By some accounts, Myrick and Sanchez covertly followed their student cinematographers, leaving food at designated points, and ratcheting up the level of tension at night. But is THIS true, or so much publicity fluff? Questions plague us...

   Burkittsville, Maryland does indeed exist, and is a venue for civil war re-enactors commemorating the Battle of Antietam. That event stimulated at least one folk legend that puts the area on the list of authentic "spooky places" which are the delight of roadside Americana junkies. Drive out Gapland Road and you come to Spook Hill, one of dozens of "geographical anomalies" where, it is said, objects like cars seem to roll uphill in defiance of gravity. Spook Hill is similar to its namesake in Lake Wales, Florida, or other colorfully named spots like Gravity Hill (Indiana), Anti-Gravity Hill (this one down under in Australia), or Mystery Spot Road in Santa Cruz, CA. "Spooky Houses" make similar claims, seducing tourists with their delightful, colorful claims of haunting apparitions and disorienting construction.

   A combination of optical perspective and our human physiology is likely the real explanation behind the claims made by roadside guides and "spooky house" proprietors who embellish the tourist experience by referring to "mysterious forces" or "gravitational anomalies." The visual cues which we rely on -- walls, trees, stairs -- may be leaning at an angle. Dark rooms or night can amplify the sense of disorientation. Water or cars indeed may appear to be rolling uphill in seeming defiance of physical laws.

   The Burkittsville "Spook Hill" legend holds that it is haunted by Confederate troops from the Civil War who were ambushed by federals as they were pushing a cannon up the hill. Along with inspiring this nugget of local folklore, the story has also been commemorated in a short "Spooky Symphony" composed and performed by students from the Smithsburg High School Orchestra.

   But beyond this, the claims which surround "The Blair Witch Project" rapidly vanish into a gossamer, flickering reality of neither fact nor fiction. The book detailing this demonic history, "The Blair Witch Cult," appears nowhere in the catalogue of the Library of Congress, the British Museum, or other authoritative repositories, nor is it listed in any standard bibliographic sources we examined. Like the jerking black and white imagery of the movie, it appears as a device to goad us into suspending our sense of disbelief -- a necessary prerequisite in the craft of the horror genre. Myrick and Sanchez take us one step further, though, than the typical fright flick or creature feature; a sensible viewer knows that The Exorcist, Night of the Living Dead or any other bone-chiller which defines this cinematic sensibility is a work of fiction. (There was the claim, though, that William Peter Blatty based his novel "The Exorcist" on a "true" case of ritual exorcism). What renders "The Blair Witch Project" so compelling is the imagery itself, though, which looks "so real" and authentic. It lacks the polished edge of even a grade-B production where a mediocre director can labor through repetitive takes until the shot is just right. The footage is rough, unrehearsed, and spontaneous; it provides us with the illusion of what we might have seen had we, too, ventured into the woods with the three students.

   "The Blair Witch Project" is the latest salute to postmodernism and the further blurring of cognitive lines separating the popular sense of reality from fantasy. It parallels the media slurry of "unsolved mystery" programs which claim to objectively probe the depths of pop-culture pseudoscience, from UFOs and Bigfoot sightings to claims of ESP and ghosts. The fringe subject matter is offset by sheer production values; the absurd content seems more real and credible since these programs often incorporate the visual imagery of the working news room and state-of-the-art computer graphics. A coifed narrator may be talking about intergalactic alien rapists, but the show -- sans subject matter -- could well be the evening news. In the background, people are sitting at computer terminals, or walking around with stacks of files. Is this Dan Rather's stage set?

   "The Blair Witch Project" borrows the same strategy, but in a different way. This all seems so real because it looks like a home movie. The subtext informs us that this was not rehearsed (indeed, it becomes a monument to the art of method film making since the actors wandered in the woods for days, not quite sure of what was going on), and thus must be "real." It reminds us of a recent pseudo-documentary which purported to be the home video record of a family that happened to film an alien encounter at dinner time. It also borrows on the perplexing anxieties in "Alien Autopsy." It's so cheesy, so wonderful a fake -- could it be the real thing?

   No doubt, "The Blair Witch Project" may find a cult following not only of those who admit that it is a new classic in the genre, but is either real or based on a pervasive substratum of fact. It may turn out to be the film equivalent of those "Spooky Houses" and hills where people do believe that something strange and bizarre is going on, that the water is indeed running uphill, but with a higher degree of sophistication. We live in a credulous age, one in seeming conflict between the contemplative imagery of Rodin's thinker, and the poster hanging in Fox Mulder's office which declares, "I want to believe."

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