Blair Witch Review

7 out of 10

Cast:

James Allen McCune as James Donahue

Callie Hernandez as Lisa Arlington

Brandon Scott as Peter Jones

Corbin Reid as Ashley Bennett

Wes Robinson as Lane

Valorie Curry as Talia

Directed by Adam Wingard

Blair Witch Review:

If you were alive and going to movies in 1999, you probably have a Blair Witch Project story. How you saw it opening weekend, probably waiting in a line that wrapped around the cinema (this was before the days of Fandango), then shuffling out of the film when it was finished like you’d been through a very harrowing experience, looking for the car at night and praying that you at least parked under a street light where no trees were around. And that’s if you liked the movie, or the movie worked on you – for many, The Blair Witch Project simply didn’t work, and for those audiences, they sat for an hour and a half listening to people they hated and trying to not vomit at the shaky camerawork. But like it or not, The Blair Witch was an absolute phenomenon, one that likely won’t happen again. It was a confluence of many variables – the infancy of the Internet, the ambitions of a couple of experimental directors, and an audience hungry to be scared again. The Blair Witch Project is still the most profitable film in history, and even after all these years, it still has the power to shock and disturb – at least, for those willing to let it in. I watched it again last week to prepare for Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s sequel Blair Witch, and I must admit that while I’m a little more jaded than when the film played in theaters, it still had an incredible power over me, and even when watching it in the safety of my own bedroom, I needed to turn the bathroom light on.

I have particular loves when it comes to horror – I much prefer to be disturbed and creeped out than to be startled, and the original Blair Witch Project requires a lot of heavy lifting of the imagination for it to work. There are understated ideas in the original film that could easily be misinterpreted or ignored altogether. I can’t count how many times someone who wasn’t a fan griped about how dumb the campers were, and why they simply didn’t walk in one direction, and how no one can truly get lost in America anymore, to which I would reply, “Perhaps the woods didn’t let them leave.” Because the film doesn’t show anything, it’s up to us, the audience, to project their own thinking onto the movie, and if that audience was willing to do the work, The Blair Witch Project could get under your skin like very few horror films can. But it could also be said that the filmmakers didn’t do their jobs as storytellers and forced the audience to invent conclusions that may or may not have actually been in the story. It was a breath of fresh air to the horror genre, and changed everything permanently. There’s a DIY attitude to the original film that, over the years became even more endearing and even charming. Like many seminal films before it, The Blair Witch Project is one of those films that inspired many would-be filmmakers to pick up a camera and tell their story.

One of those filmmakers was Adam Wingard, and now, 17 years later, Wingard and writer Simon Barrett bring us Blair Witch (while Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows is mostly ignored, some of that film’s ideas manage to find their way into the new film).  But being a follow-up to a film like The Blair Witch Project has its distinct advantages and disadvantages, which is probably why Wingard, Barrett, and Lionsgate kept the making of this film on the down low for as long as they could. Anticipation can invigorate a franchise, or it can kill it outright, and the burden of being the sequel to one of the most financially successful films of all time is a huge one, and I credit everyone involved in the secretive aspects of Blair Witch’s making. But marketing (or lack thereof) can only go so far, and in the end is irrelevant to the real question, which is whether or not Blair Witch succeeds as a movie.

Blair Witch has no problems defining and adding to the established mythology of the first film and the “Curse of the Blair Witch” mockumentary. The ideas and themes tossed around the film like stories from a campfire are when Blair Witch really works. As we hear the characters describe the legends that they’ve heard through the years, Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett tap into the dread and the foreboding that made the first film so effective, and they just describe enough of it so that the audience gets to play around with these “histories” in their collective heads. Even the understated aspects of the first film, such as the sinister nature of the woods, return, although these aspects are made much more explicit. 

It’s that explicitness that becomes a drawback to Blair Witch, but it was also unavoidable considering the length of time between the first film and now, and the demands of modern audiences in comparison to the audiences of 1999. I’m not saying that audiences now are somehow less astute, but attention spans have definitely changed, and even to those coming into these films for the first time, there are some things that have to be explained.  Still, it takes away some of the power of the first film, where we are not fed information and must wander in the darkness by ourselves. Instead of the quiet banging of rocks and distant screams in the dark, the sound booms, shudders, and creaks, and it doesn’t engage the imagination to the level of the first. Again, that was inevitable, and Blair Witch finds its own creepiness and tone in those choices, especially in the insane final act. It may not work on the level of the first film (and it’s hard not to compare the two), but it does work on its own established level, and I admire just how weird and almost Lovecraftian Blair Witch gets in its conclusory moments.

The film establishes very early on that, like in the first film, this group of campers is doomed. James (James Allen McCune) is looking for his sister Heather, who vanished in the woods all those years ago, only leaving behind the mysterious videotape. But James is convinced that there is something there, and when a YouTube video posted by Lane (Wes Robinson) makes the rounds on the Internet, James is convinced that his sister may still be out there. Joining James in his expedition into the woods is his childhood friend Peter (Brandon Scott) and his girlfriend Ashley (Corbin Reed), and James’ friend Lisa (Callie Hernandez), who is filming James and his search for his sister for a class project. Lane and his girlfriend Talia (Valorie Curry) take James and his friends to where he found the footage that he posted, and then things go south very, very fast. The woods become mercurial and time becomes ephemeral, as distances inexplicably go strange and night becomes a constant, unending darkness. Even with all their high-tech gear on hand, there is a malevolence in the woods that defies their attempts to document and understand it. They are being hunted.

Blair Witch is glossy and slick in all the ways the original isn’t. But it’s in that lack of sheen in The Blair Witch Project, that scrappy, never-say-die aspect to the filmmaking that makes that film work. Even the way the actors used the cameras in the first film forced us as an audience to pay attention in ways we wouldn’t have if the film had been shot more traditionally. The imperfections in the original are almost quaint and add to the authenticity and the verisimilitude of the film. Adam Wingard attempts to do the same in Blair Witch, but he’s just too good a filmmaker in that regard, showing when he should be suggesting, and those same flaws in the new film feel calculated and distracting. The sloppy nature of the original works in its favor; Wingard’s skills as a filmmaker are almost a detriment. Wingard does capture the ferocity and the chaos of running blind into the malevolent woods, but there are moments that would have worked better had they simply been suggested instead of overt. I don’t envy him his job; it’s a tightrope that he’s walking, playing with what’s been established previously but injecting his own voice and talents into the mix. Much of the time it works; some of the time it doesn’t.

Finally, while Blair Witch is always interesting and never dull, it’s just not as scary as the first film. This is a well that perhaps should have only been explored once – the first time we had no idea what we were seeing (and for almost the entire film, we literally saw nothing), but this time we are prepared. As much as I wanted to be scared, to be disturbed, Blair Witch couldn’t get me there. The original film has very little jump scares, and the ones it does have count. Blair Witch has moments of genuine dread, but it tries to startle a few too many times, and too many of those times are fake outs. It’s during the film’s final act that Blair Witch finds its voice, and those scenes work like gangbusters, because while they are dependent on what the first film does, they have a strength and a tone all their own. It’s during those moments, when Blair Witch breaks away from what’s been established and becomes its own thing, that the movie truly succeeds in being terrifying, and gets under the skin effectively. It may not be entirely fair to compare these two films so much, but Blair Witch invites and sometimes even demands that comparison. The filmmakers are trying for that place where fans of the original film and the audience who may not have appreciated the first film’s subtleties meet, but the movie truly soars when it gets to its own place beholden to neither.

While Blair Witch is fascinating, riveting, frustrating, and explanatory, sometimes all at once, it is still entertaining. Even when the movie doesn’t work, Blair Witch exudes a strange power that, while not on the level of the first, is still worth experiencing in a theater. Blair Witch is a good movie that is in the unfortunate position of following a great one.