The Blair Witch Project gets its “scariness” from its ability to portray reality and to depict horror, not in a stylized and dramatized way, but in a way which seems highly believable possible in real life. The film tries to recreate the aura of horror, and it does so through bare-bones production techniques and realistic acting instead of through visual effects and dramatization which greatly detract from the reality of horror and reassure audiences that the “horror” on the screen isn’t real.
The first quote affirms Walter Benjamin’s belief that aura disappears in film because the audience is not physically there. Benjamin is correct in that The Blair Witch Project cannot perfectly recreate the aura of physically being present during the characters’ time in the woods. But the second quotes says that film presents a better depiction of reality than visual art because it “penetrates deeply into [reality’s] web.” The Blair Witch Project, through its very medium of film, gets closer to reality than any other form of mechanical reproduction because of this “penetration.”
The Blair Witch Project does try to recapture the aura, especially through its marketing as real home videos that were “found” in the woods (instead of a highly produced, directed, edited, etc. piece of entertainment). But it also attempts to cut into reality. Instead of highly stylized camera shots, the film employs a shaky camera technique and the actors break the fourth wall and talk to the camera/audience. By both recreating aura and cutting into reality, The Blair Witch Project creates a new and highly effective kind of horror film.
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