Blair Witch is a 17-years-later sequel to 1999’s sleeper hit The Blair Witch Project, which launched the found-footage craze. But no-one realised it was even in the works as filmmakers had shrouded it in secrecy as a fi lm known only as The Woods. With a tagline that reads “There’s something evil hiding in the woods”, they hope it will draw both fans of the original and a new generation who has heard about it. The problem is that there already was one, the generally dire “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2” (2000), not to mention countless found-footage rip-offs in the years since, some of them inspired (the “Paranormal Activities” series) but majority a waste of a perfectly good battery charger.
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Big kudos go out to screenwriter Barrett for creating a script that throws out so many curve balls. Predictably, just like in the first movie, they are lost and go in circles, always returning to their campsite.
He credits much of the success of the original film to its marketing. One of the group is the brother of Heather from The Blair Witch Project, and that’s about as much depth of character as you get for the rest of the movie.
The footage purported to be the doomed trio’s own as they kept the camera rolling while they encountered creepy stick figures, mysterious piles of rocks and a presence following them around, scaring the bejesus out of them. A video has been sent to James suggesting that Heather is alive. James is accompanied by Lisa (Callie Hernandez), a newbie documentarian, and two friends, Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid), all of whom seeming stupid for going into the notoriously man-eating woods. Lisa outfits the entire team with earpiece cameras, allowing us to see the movie from almost every perspective, though this often makes it hard to figure out whose eyes you’re seeing through.
And there’s plenty of popcornspilling shocks along the way. It’s more shaky camera footage, but it appears to show his sister in more footage than what was found in the original movie. The scares can be kind of predictable: “Oh, it’s been quiet for 10 seconds?”
In the 2016 version, the group of hunters have, of course, ditched the old-fashioned video camera of the original. They bring two-way radios, GPS, and even a remote-controlled drone to fly above the trees for aerial perspectives. “You can call it a gimmick or whatever, but it was so brilliantly conceived as this real event that happened”, he says.
McCune admits even the cast were genuinely terrifi ed during the 32-day shoot in Canada. We’ve seen so much, both great and poor, that it’s hard to get sucked in like we did 17 years ago.
“He knew that audiences wouldn’t care about what was happening unless we believed it, and we always did”.
However, there are only so many times you can see characters charging noisily through undergrowth in the dead of night, twitching with terror in close-up at each rustle of leaves, before tension dissipates.
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“This movie was nearly as scary to shoot as it will be to watch”.
