Yet we didn’t fear a Blair Witch; we feared reprisals for trashing a ranger’s cabin. “So there were some challenges”.
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The long-awaited Blair Witch Project follow-up doesn’t have a theme song, but if it did I’d suggest Teddy Bear Picnic. None of them knew it was going to happen, and the crew did it unexpectedly to get their natural reactions on film. The first sequel of the movie was released on October 27, 2000, titled Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. The “found footage” story of a trio of documentarians seeking out a Maryland spectre known as the Blair Witch, the film started with an amusing mockumentary tone that gradually fell away to be replaced with inexorably mounting dread. A sequel? A reboot? I sense another sequel coming up…
“The reason we’re not calling it “Blair Witch 3″ is because we want to come at this thing with a fresh new perspective”, says Wingard. In the 17 years since we last saw her, she’s upped her game and invested in some fancy new toys that make bigger and louder bumps in the night than ever. “It’s weird where life takes you, though, because I had no idea when I watched it that I would do the sequel one day”.
“You felt there were all these clues and hidden messages”, he says.
“You’re constantly running from something into a scenario that’s even more frightening”. “That’s where my obsession began, really”. The effect was so convincing that millions of people actually believed that it was a real documentary about an authentic legend, that the three young people had gone missing in the woods, and that their equipment and the footage depicting the horrors that befell them had been found a year later. We get it, guys – you’re desperate to get out. And how people would approach her on the street “telling me that they wished I was dead”.
The brainchild of Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard, the indie writer-director team that produced far more innovative thrillers like “The Guest” and “You’re Next”, this movie takes the “shaky cam syndrome” to the ultimate extreme. Adam adds: “One of my favourite things about watching horror movies is the jump scares and I’ve always included them in my films”. The tension, naturally, doesn’t feel as tight as when we first went into these woods, but Wingard, as he did with the film’s “fake” title, is confidently exploiting his chance to bring our guard down.
It’s been almost two decades since The Blair Witch Project came out, and in all that time directors have been exploring the limits of the found-footage genre, and yet the only stylistic update Wingard and cinematographer Robby Baumgartner can muster is to pack in as much digital-camera glitch as humanly possible.
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Although un-original, Blair Witch does provide some truly gut wrenching scenes. If next year’s Oscars has a category for Best Supporting Sapling, “Blair Witch” is a lock. “I thought he was kidding, but he was not kidding”. “[But] you’ve got to get the series back on track first”.
