Have you heard about the new movie The Blair Witch Project? The film begins by telling the audience that in 1994 a group of three film students set out to make a documentary about something called the "Blair Witch Legend." The students subsequently disappeared, the story goes, in the woods near the town of Burkittsville, Md., and their film — this movie — was found one year after their disappearance. The film then establishes a two-level frame narrative with the documentary about the Blair Witch Legend running parallel to and interspersed with the filmmaker's video diary of the filming of the documentary.

The three students: Heather, Josh and Mike, shop for food for their camping trip, shoot their first scene in the Burkittsville graveyard and begin to interview local people for information about the legend. No one person seems to know much, but several of the interviewees direct the film students to a woman named Mary Brown, who is supposed to know a lot about the legend. They go down to the trailer park where Mary Brown lives, and Mary emerges from her trailer wearing a large cross around her neck and holding a large, black book clearly marked "Holy Bible."

That a Christian woman is depicted as the source of knowledge about the local legend is interesting enough. More interesting is what happens next. While on their way to the woods that have been the scene of the principle events of the Blair Witch Legend, the students mock Mary.

As you might expect, things soon turn very spooky. At first, the students try to brush off the unsettling events happening to them, but when they are finally confronted with hard evidence that something real is behind the eerie occurrences, their minds again turn to Mary Brown. Something in "that Bible story" she mentioned is applicable to their situation. But they can't recall what that something is because the minute she began telling them a story from the Bible, they wrote her off as a lunatic.

Immediately after this, the horror and fear become inescapable, and Heather, Josh and Mike begin a cycle of backbiting, selfishness, anger, mutual recrimination and foolish pettiness which seals their fate. Unable to overcome their own fear and egotism, they are destroyed by the evil lurking in the woods.

A subtle moral emerges. If they'd paid attention when Mary Brown began quoting the Bible instead of writing her off as a lunatic, they might have learned something that could have saved them. Though I doubt the filmmakers — the real ones, not the actors playing at being film students — intended to convey this message, it's there. Another brutal, but true message Christians will recognize is that witchcraft kills. The contempt which the young film students show for the supernatural message of salvation in the Bible and the supernatural threat of occultism is a direct cause of their demise.

This is quite a change from recent films and t.v. shows that glorify occult practices and depict witchcraft as harmless. Again, I don't think the filmmakers sought to convey this message, but it's refreshing to find it at all in such a pop culture sensation as The Blair Witch Project. What seems to me more likely, and on a certain level encouraging, is that the filmmakers grew up in a culture shaped predominantly by Christian mores and could not help but absorb certain elements of Christian thought regardless of their personal attitudes toward Christ and believers in Him.

Frankly, if we were to point out the influence of Christian thought on everything from legal protection of free speech to the prison system in this country, we could and would overwhelm the hollow arguments of those who blithely assert that "America never was a Christian nation," or "Christianity has contributed nothing but ignorance and superstition to our culture." The influence of Christian ideas on the plot of The Blair Witch Project affords us with an opportunity to open discussions along these lines with non-Christian friends, neighbors and co-workers.

If it sounds like I'm giving a ringing endorsement of this movie, let me temper that right now. Devoid of nudity and violence, the film is psychologically intense, loaded with profanity and toys with the occult. There is a slight bit of gore, but it's considerably less than what you'd see on an episode of "Law and Order," or "Homicide: Life on the Streets." (If there's one thing the makers of The Blair Witch Project understand — something that escaped the makers of "The Haunting" and other big-budget horror films — it's that the things we don't see are often more frightening than the things we do.)

The Blair Witch Project is an intense, ultra-realistic scare-fest, designed to exploit occultic imagery to generate fear. It's also an intelligently crafted phenomena with subtle, if unintended, Christian themes that might provide a good springboard for discussion with non-believers. The Old Testament is full of warnings against practicing witchcraft and the realism of this film is a good reminder why.