The astonishing US box-office success of The Blair Witch Project has scared Hollywood half to death: here is a film which was reportedly made for $22,000 yet which grossed millions. It purports to be the footage shot by three film students who went missing in Maryland's Black Hills while researching the legend of the eponymous witch. The key to the film's success lies in a combination of good old-fashioned scare tactics and some very astute marketing, which suggested that the (entirely staged) footage might be genuine. Rather than offering a straightforward re-telling of the film, D.A. Stern's "dossier" is a contribution to the Blair Witch mythology, presenting "a bizarre and notorious backstory" which unfolds after the students' footage has been found. The book details the investigations of one Buck Buchanan, presenting to the reader the evidence which he gathers. Instead of a conventional narrative, the dossier creates a plot from sources such as interview transcripts, ... read more