The film attempts to push the mythology of the Blair Witch forward, adding some horrific detail to her history and implying all sorts of rules for survival – few of which, of course, the group follow. He brings along his girlfriend Lisa (Callie Hernandez) and friends Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid).
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Likewise, Wingard and Barrett fall into the same trap with “Blair Witch” by taking the exhausted conventions of the found footage genre and leaving them mostly unchanged (efforts are made to play around with the film’s timeline but like the neurotics in “You’re Next” the concept is barely more than a momentary distraction). Lane (Wes Robinson) is a metalhead hillbilly while his girlfriend, Talia (Valorie Curry), is a bit of a creep, complete with white and purple hair.
The plot thickens when the YouTube users who posted the footage of James’ sister decide to tag along.
When a fan tweeted Berlinger, who would go on to be nominated for an Academy Award as the director of the documentary Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, to inquire about a director’s cut of Shadows, he pointed them in the direction of the studio.
Ironically, I was in Toronto and just couldn’t bring myself to go see it and relive the trauma.
Ninety percent of this movie can’t be scary to save its life. And we realize not everyone likes watching movies in the theater. For all its cutting-edge tech, Blair Witch doesn’t rethink its more analog predecessor so much as remake it, beat for beat.
The beauty of the original film lies in its mystery, in how it makes you feel like you never quite know exactly what’s happening.
Maybe we can still get that story, guys?
In an excellent piece published over at IndieWire, producer Gregg Hale and directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez talk at length about their careers after the release of The Blair Witch Project, which established them in a huge way while also placing them in a box. This is an important point, because it means that Blair Witch takes place in a world where The Blair Witch Project exists, but not as a popular blockbuster movie; rather, they’ve seen the footage from the original film as if was a “real” thing.
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One and a Half Stars out of Five. For the most part, though, I found myself curiously bored by Blair Witch once it started trying to actively terrify me, despite the obvious talents of the cast and crew. Anything could happen – and although, for most of the running time, absolutely nothing did, the audience were wound into such a fever of anticipation that the eerie glimpse of a man standing in a corner became more disturbing than any gorefest’s bloody coup-de-grace.
