10 Horror Movies That Prove Less Is More

10. The Blair Witch Project

When The Blair Witch Project hit cinemas back in 1999, it was like nothing else audiences had seen at the time.

Ditching the typicality of narrative filmmaking with its groundbreaking found footage style, this unconventional presentation style melded perfectly with a viral marketing campaign which effectively sold the film as something more real than horror fans had ever seen before.

But what really pushed Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's film over the top was their subtle, restrained, and economic approach to scares. Rather than littering the screen with gore, ghouls, and tired jump scares, the viewer is left to fill in the blanks themselves.

Through the sheer atmosphere of the woods and compellingly terrified performances of cast members Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard, The Blair Witch Project proved itself an uncommonly tense horror despite never once showing the titular entity itself (a virtue the 2016 sequel sadly ditched).

The film's astronomical success ushered in an era of me-too imitators which quickly rendered the found footage genre tiresome, but the original article is proof perfect that the ingenuity of the human imagination cannot be topped.