A very screamy mess: New Witch falls flat
Blair Witch doesn’t recapture once-in-a-lifetime terror that made the 1999 classic so unforgettable
In the pre-Twitter, pre-YouTube, pre-Instagramming-your-lunch-for-your-12-followers era of the late 1990s, we were sweetly naive as filmgoers. Found-footage horror movies — that is, scary flicks that purport to have been shot by the (usually dead or missing) characters themselves — were essentially unheard of, outside of geek circles.
Into that perfect moment in time, when Handycams were common but Google was just taking its first wobbly steps, came 1999’s The Blair Witch Project. And when a tuqueclad Heather Donahue snivelled into the camera about being so, so sorry for everything that had happened, we wondered if maybe, just maybe, it was real.
That kind of benign ignorance no longer exists. As such, Blair Witch — a sequel to The Blair Witch Project — doesn’t try to convince us it’s composed of a bunch of recovered tapes and memory cards. Instead, it follows the template of the now-familiar found-footage format with a bit of a knowing wink, yet leapfrogs past most of what made the original film so terrifying.
Opening in theatres Friday after its Canadian première at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, Blair Witch picks up some 22 years after the events of the first film, as Heather Donahue’s younger brother James (James Allen McCune) discovers a YouTube video that suggests his sister is still alive somewhere in the woods surrounding Burkittsville, Md.
Obsessed with learning his sister’s fate on that fateful trip in 1994, James enlists the help of pals Lisa (Callie Hernandez), Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid), who load up with GoPro-style headgear, HD video cameras and even a drone. Along with shifty locals Lane (Wes Robinson) and Talia (Valorie Curry), the gang heads deep into the forbidding woods in search of Heather. Unsurprisingly, things start to get very weird.
Director Adam Wingard (VHS) knows we’re intimately familiar with both The Blair Witch Project and found-footage horror in general, and in the early going Blair Witch does capture slivers of that oldschool sense of foreboding. Tents, dark woods, unfamiliar sounds, creepy twig figures … all the stuff that drove our imaginations into a frenzy in The Blair Witch Project get their due here, briefly.
But Lingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett don’t seem to think audiences in 2016 will be satisfied with these kinds of cerebral scares. Where the first film never truly made it clear if there was a supernatural force at work and showed nothing that would seem terribly scary in the bright light of day, Blair Witch eventually goes all-in on the impossible, with pulsating skin parasites, flying tents and some computer-generated imagery that undermines the carefully constructed practical effects. Mix in a few jump scares and smart characters doing dumb things, and suddenly what started out feeling like a Cabin in the Woods-style deconstruction/celebration of found-footage horror becomes just another screamy mess.
There’s been a surprising amount of spinoff media set in the Blair Witch universe over the years, and fans of this world will probably enjoy revisiting it on the big screen for the first time since 2000’s forgotten dog of a sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.
But while Blair Witch does have a few moments of tension and dread, it simply doesn’t recapture the oncein-a-lifetime terror that made the original film so unforgettable. Maybe the inevitable next sequel will fare better. Or the one after that. Or the one after that …