Or just maybe it's a natural reaction to the barrelling hype that has surrounded the film since it's sly Stateside release? Oh to have caught it at Sundance when preconceptions were unsullied. The publicity overkill inevitably leaves the final product feeling a little like shop-worn goods. The only surprise left, maybe, would be if one of the nascent film-makers was to fess up that realising this cut-price shiver-fest actually demanded a king's ransom.

But what, you want to know, is it like? Is it actually any good? Is it scary?

Well, yes, it is, and no, it isn't. Good and scary, respectively. It's difficult to imagine anyone brought up on a respectable diet of horror and suspense finding it heart-poundingly, sweat-inducingly frightening. Which, I suppose, makes it scarcely any different to the vast majority of what passes in the genre these days. Except that Blair Witch at least achieves as much as it does by not doing what we expect. No rubber suits, no CGI; hell, no Witch. A few rocks piled up beside a tent, noises in the night, stick-men dangling from trees. Nothing you couldn't do in the woods this weekend. The trick is to be more reactive than proactive, not least in the way the three leads seem imperilled as much by imagination as situation. Like pornography, horror is best done cheap.

That's where the picture’s strengths lie. Not in easy scares but in the interplay between three film students lost, map-less, in the woods around Burkittsville, Maryland whilst filming a documentary on the supposed Blair Witch. That way we can distance ourselves from the hype and report that the structure is strong, that the largely improvised dialogue is raw and sharp, and that the performances (Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, Joshua Leonard; they use their own real first names) are excellent.

Of course, losing the map is a tease, because, as we've seen several times, they have it on videotape. No, that's less to do with propelling the plot than fucking with the internal dynamic of the group: three personalities and a definite gender divide. And as their further adventures seek to show, someone or something is either fucking with the compass or rearranging the very woods themselves.

Not that there is any verifiable evidence of the supernatural. In much the same way that the film-makers were able to screw with their actors, this could all simply be deadly games played-out by a bunch of backwoodsmen. Except, as Mike comments when they stumble across a blizzard of stick figures, no redneck was ever this creative.

But, no, sorry to repeat myself, but it really isn't frightening. Maybe if you were there, if you caught children's voices drifting sonorously on the wind at 3am, then, certainly, it would scare the shit out of you. But not here, and not like this. It's unsettling. And then only after the event. Although, paradoxically, given all I've said, the film really is at its most effective right at the close, when it comes closest to showing us something. The last five minutes - indeed, the very last shot - are remarkable. The ending is oblique, austere and sudden, the film reeling out before you can grasp what it's saying. In that way it works better on a single viewing - and then in a cinema, where you cannot rewind.

Unsettling and relentless. In which sense, although it most effortlessly resembles a horror flick shot under Dogme '95 restrictions (the actors operated the video and 16mm cameras themselves), it perhaps most provokes memories of Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Certainly it appreciates the use of creative screaming to screw with the viewer's head like few films since. And, although I would claim no direct influence, it does rather put one in mind of BBC1's infamous 1992 Halloween shocker, Ghostwatch. (Incidentally, if anyone has a copy of that, please get in touch.)

Of course Hollywood will cotton on soon enough. Joel Schumacher with a Handycam. Be afraid. Be very afraid. The independent sector happened along and caught them on the hop again, just as they started grinding gears on that lumbering SFX behemoth, their ill-starred remake of The Haunting. All furcoat and no knickers. It just goes to show that no one has really made a good scary movie since those exemplars of the form - the original Haunting and Jack Clayton's eerie The Innocents - thirty odd years ago. The Blair Witch Project will inevitably disappoint you on that front, but give it chance and you just might be surprised in an entirely different way.