The Blair Witch Project is, whether I like it or not, a masterpiece. Mostly a masterpiece of marketing. The producers were able to take an ultra-cheap experimental movie and turn it into a genre-defining hit. Every found footage film before or since has to be compared to The Blair Witch Project.
I only begrudgingly respect The Blair Witch Project. I hated it in 1999 and still don't enjoy it despite several rewatches. It is a weird kind of movie to blow up as big as it did. Mass audiences like their horror with easy big scares, which Blair Witch Project has none of. You never see the witch. Instead most of the movie is three people lost in the woods slowly turning on each other. It does end with a fantastic final scene in that dirty abandoned house. But you aren't getting gore or big jump scares. The Blair Witch Project commits to its simplicity, for better or worse.
Decades later, a sequel came out, Blair Witch (2016). (There is also Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 that nobody on Earth likes. Blair Witch 3 would prefer you forgot Blair Witch 2 happened.) Much like the original, the third Blair Witch was largely built around a stunt marketing campaign. Nobody could be fooled into believing this was a real story. Decades of mostly terrible found footage movies had poisoned that well. So instead, they made Blair Witch a total surprise. It had a shock release at San Diego Comic Con, airing to an audience that had no idea they were seeing a Blair Witch Project sequel. The studio got Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, two rising horror names, to make the film.
None of that did Blair Witch much good. It disappointed at the box office and nobody fights for it now. That is a shame because I think Blair Witch is actually great. This is the movie I wanted The Blair Witch Project to be twenty years ago. You actually get to fucking see something this time.
If you're a Blair Witch Project 1 purist, if you love the original because of its subtlety and slow build, Blair Witch 3 might offend you. The original movie had its characters scream in the dark at sounds you could not hear. The 2016 movie has them scream in the dark at loud roars and trees toppling over. You were never sure in the original if there was a witch at all or if these were just stupid dumbasses with no sense of direction. The new movie explicitly shows spooky shit happening all around them. You even get blurry shots of the Witch. She's real! The last half hour is a giant climax of scares and effects.
The plot this time is about James (James Allan McCune) who is the presumably much younger brother of the main character from the first Blair Witch Project, Heather. Decades after his sister disappeared in the woods and left her spooky footage behind, James believes she might still be alive. She seems to have shown up in a freaky Youtube video. Ignoring the obvious danger and the Jersey Devil-esque lore around the Blair Witch, James wants to find his sister. He joins up with his girlfriend Lisa (Callie Hernandez) and some other friends to explore the Maryland wilderness. Leading them is some locals, Lane (Wes Robinson) and Talia (Valorie Curry), who claim to be experts.
The locals are experts in all of jack and shit. Everybody gets lost real fast. The GPS and modern technology are easily defeated by the evil. Stick figures begin to appear all around the campsites. Then much larger, freakier ones surround the camp. Time does not work quite right in the Blair Woods. The whole final hour of the movie is endless night which the characters believe lasts for days. A horrible thing happens to one girl, Ashley's (Corbin Reed) foot. Something is growing inside her leg in some delicious body horror.
Blair Witch is helped a lot by a much larger budget and the easy availability of HD cameras. The 1999 film is shot on crappy cameras, which gives a rough and filthy realism. But also, half the time you barely understand what is even happening. The new movie does not care too much for realism at all. By the final climax, the filmmakers barely care about keeping track of the cameras. Lisa puts down her camera yet we keep getting POV shots from her. This is not a movie that allows the found footage gimmick to get in the way of good movie-making. I don't know who edited conversations into shot-reverse shot (maybe the Witch uses Adobe Premiere), but thanks for that.
Blair Witch is more of the big dumb blockbuster horror I'm looking for. I ended up really enjoying this movie. The cast is really solid. The scares are there. It isn't subtle and it isn't revolutionary, but who cares? I want a good scary horror movie that can give me a freaky POV experience of a haunted house and a witch. I got that with the third movie. Maybe I won't die on the Book of Shadows hill, but I'll die on this hill. Blair Witch is great.
Next Time: The Wailing (2016) because I need to get Korea in this party.
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