10 Horror Movies Where You Never See The Villain
8. The Blair Witch Project
The Blair Witch Project was an early pioneer of the found footage subgenre, using its low $60,000 budget to its advantage to tell a minimalist tale with maximum technical and psychological plausibility.
One of the film's smartest choices is to never once show the audience the titular malevolent entity stalking the three filmmakers (Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams) deep in the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland.
The first act of the movie efficiently outlines the lore surrounding the Blair Witch, while the rest of the film employs subtle scares - from bizarre emblems appearing in the woods to eerie sound effects - to suggest the presence of something untoward in the woods.
Even at its disturbing end, the fate of the three youngsters is only ever implied by clever camerawork and the previously established mythology.
Sadly the 2016 "sequel" made the ill-advised decision to briefly show audiences the Blair Witch in the form of an unconvincing CGI abomination, stripping all the mystery away.
As the original film proved, the creature we all concocted in our minds was so much scarier.