I don't think Blair Witch Project was the first found footage movie, I think there were a few before but they certainly didn't have the same popularity. What was ground breaking about Blair Witch is the way that it was marketed.. And this was in an era when the internet was just beginning to be popular, but social media wasn't a thing and it was still possible to pull something like that. I saw Blair Witch a few years after it came out, as a teenager.. and personally I find that there are some found footage films I was much more affected by, but it's still the movie that launched the genre.
I remember when I was younger and a huge horror film fan, found footage films were not really considered to be good and I was often around film bros who tried to find the most disturbing and gruesome movies and would want to prove that ''they're not scared'' lol... And Blair Witch was perceived as a ''bad movie'' when I was in film school, by pretentious French teachers. Tbh the horror genre didn't have a good reputation.
A separate thread would be : which movie have you found the most disturbing or scary.. It's not because it leaves you traumatized that it's necessarily good.
