The Blair Witch Project popularised the found footage genre, taking inexperienced actors, giving them a camera and throwing them into the woods for a mostly improvised wild goose chase that, when edited down to 81 minutes of nerve-wracking tension, became a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon, making $248 million against a $25k budget. More through necessity than desire, this movie allowed the viewer's mind to populate the cinematic space and create most of the frightening images themselves: the film just gave audiences the location and set the mood. Best Moment: The frighteningly ambiguous ending, in which the youngsters finally face off against what has been terrorising them in the woods. Sequel: A conventional narrative sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, was rushed into production for release the very next year, and despite being commercially successful (albeit not on the scale of the first film), was a critical dud.