The Blair Witch spell was brief, says DONALD CLARKE

Almost exactly 10 years ago, a film was released in Irish cinemas that changed absolutely everything. Made for 86 cents and a handful of buttons, The Blair Witch Projectwas singlehandedly responsible for handing the means of cinema production back to the workers.

In the years since that dank, musty horror film astonished analysts by taking a quarter of a billion dollars at the world’s box- office, cinema has ceased to function like an impersonal industry and begun to behave more like the world of publishing. Get access to a computer and you can write a novel. Get hold of a digital camera and you can shoot a film.

Since Blair Witchproved that homemade pictures could generate huge incomes, the multiplexes have been overtaken by intimate, individually authored digital dramas. Why, this year alone, such films as Danny Cheapskate's I'll Die Tomorrow, I'll Fly Tomorrow(the tale of a terminally ill butterfly collector) and Cindy Woolyhat's Braver Than the Suits(a quirky quirk comedy set in Quirkton) have set the box-office alight. Indeed, it might not be going too far to say that Blair Witchkilled Hollywood.

Yeah, yeah. I'm indulging in one my "jokes" again. It is, however, hard to underestimate how excited pundits got about the success of The Blair Witch Project. Such an unusual phenomenon must meansomething. If these guys can make a blockbuster on pocket money, then others will surely follow.

Looking back, we come to the unhappy conclusion that, in fact, Blair Witchhad virtually no effect whatsoever on mainstream movie production. Its two directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, have returned to the periphery of the film industry, and the notoriously ghastly sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, made no attempt to integrate the original's lo-fi techniques.

Sure, the odd cheaply made, wholly independent film has nudged its way into cineplexes. But phenomena such as John Carney's Onceare still so rare and the sums they take so modest (Once accumulated about 12 per cent of Blair Witch's wad) that they must be regarded as welcome freaks.

Yes, the handheld aesthetic has bled into mainstream cinema and jiggly, digital productions such as Cloverfieldand District 9now do very well in the popcorn emporia. This development has, however, emerged steadily and unspectacularly over the past decade. You will look in vain for a post- Blairhandheld boom in studio releases of the early noughties.

So, uninterested in risking change and properly aware that the public only has so much tolerance for grubby, shaky footage, Hollywood continued to produce films much as it had done for the previous century.

The Blair Witch Projecthas, however, left us one lasting legacy. The boom in internet marketing would have happened anyway, but Myrick and Sánchez were the first to demonstrate that a genuine hit could be generated from online buzz alone. We have, perhaps, them to thank for the Snakes on a Planefiasco, Peter Jackson's on-set video blogs and that horrible Avatartrailer.

Thanks a bunch, guys.