Return with me to a simpler time: July, 1999.

Clinton was president. Times Square still had cars in it.  Downtown still had a World Trade Center.

In New York City, it was a month a record number of triple digit degree days. And I was pregnant with my first child. 

I was at the time Salon's fourth string movie critic, which meant I got to see a lot of dreadful teen comedies and schocky horror flicks.

But months earlier, I'd heard of a truly original and deeply unsettling little low budget fright film that had come out of Sundance. But more telling was something else.

I'm an online community person. Have been for most of my career. I host Table Talk here and had my hand in a variety of other social networks. And the buzz coming the net was unbelievable.

Filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez had done something unprecedented: they'd created a website for their spooky mockumentary of three young people who'd gone missing in the Maryland woods. They fleshed out the myth of a witch, a curse, and a history of grim crimes. 

I was fascinated, and I called dibs.

Though I did eventually see the movie one unbearably hot night in a midtown screening room, I'll confess now that I had already had an earlier glimpse. A few weeks earlier, a well connected friend in the horror world had sent me a video copy. I watched it alone in my apartment one suffocating evening and it scared the beejeebers out of me.

That was, of course, before the interminable lines started snaking out the door of the Angelika, before the movie had become one of the most profitable films in history, before the inevitable "What's the big deal?" backlash. Before the parodies. Before the hype that I, in my own small way, helped fuel.

Though none of the actors or filmmakers went on to major stardom, the film itself, and its influence, continue to resonante.  It changed the way films are marketed. It make studios realize the power of the net community. (Hey, think maybe someday newspapers and book publishers will catch on too?)

I still think it's a nifty little thriller. I'm hard pressed to think of too many horror movies of the ensuing decade that have gotten under my skin so effectively. ("Let the Right One In," definitely, but for a thousand different reasons.) And nothing, NOTHING, I have ever written has continued to generate email like my original review of "Blair Witch." I still get letters asking if it's real.

Here's what I wrote then. 

What did you think of BWP in '99, and how well do you think it's aged?