Did anyone know there was a second Blair Witch movie? (No, seriously… I had no idea.) Before the screening of Blair Witch—the direct sequel to the original The Blair Witch Project—someone mentioned that this was actually the third film in the franchise. My immediate reaction was, “When the hell was the second one?”
After some intense research (read: Wikipedia), I discovered that a sequel titled Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 came out in 2000. That film was nowhere near as successful as the 1999 original, so apparently a lot of other people forgot about it too. This 2016 entry, directed by Adam Wingard, largely ignores that middle chapter and positions itself as a soft reboot/sequel to the first movie.
Blair Witch begins with a group of college students watching a YouTube video of a young woman running in terror through an old house. James (James Allen McCune) becomes convinced that the woman is his sister Heather, who disappeared in the Black Hills Woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, more than twenty years earlier while investigating the Blair Witch legend. Armed with that belief and a tip from an online user named Lane (who goes by the handle DarkWeb666), James rounds up a group of friends—including film student Lisa (Callie Hernandez), Peter, and Ashley—and heads into the woods to investigate. They at least try to prepare: multiple cameras, GPS trackers, and even a drone. Of course, no one thinks to bring an actual weapon, but they do have a cool battery-powered drone that can only climb about a hundred feet. That preparation will prove almost completely useless, but more on that later.
In the woods they encounter Lane and his girlfriend Talia, who offer to guide them. A massive search party had gone through these same woods years ago and never found the house from the video. After just one night, things begin to go wrong, and the group quickly realizes how screwed they are.
Let’s talk about the Witch herself. I’ll answer the question right away: no, you never get a clear look at her. Unfamiliar as I was with the full extent of her powers in this series, I can report that she is ridiculously overpowered. The group is reasonably well-equipped by horror-movie standards (aside from the missing firearms), yet even a gun would have been about as effective as trying to fight an Avenger with harsh language. One of the established rules seems to be that the group must sleep overnight in the woods before the real torment begins. The next “morning” they discover they have slept well into the afternoon.
It turns out they are now trapped in a reality where the Witch controls time, weather, and the environment itself. After the group becomes separated, Lane returns to reveal that he has been wandering in darkness for what felt like days even though only a few hours have passed for the others. The Witch also demonstrates the ability to alter reality, swat a drone out of the sky from a hundred feet up, and, of course, kill the Black character first.
Blair Witch feels very much like a Paranormal Activity movie relocated to the woods. It uses the same first-person found-footage approach and relies on the same steady diet of jump scares. Roughly 99 percent of the terror comes from something or someone lunging into frame from off-screen. Characters seem incapable of announcing their presence in any way other than suddenly appearing inches from the camera, even when they were supposedly nearby the whole time.
The scares work on a basic level, but most of them are telegraphed so obviously that you spend more time waiting for the jump than actually being startled by it. For a group of young people who specifically set out not to make the same mistakes as every other horror-movie ensemble, they sure proceed to make all the classic dumb decisions and get picked off in exactly the same order.The film attempts to ride a similar social-media and viral-marketing wave as the original, but at the end of the day it feels like a cheap, calculated cash grab. Beyond updating the technology (cameras, drones, GPS), it doesn’t introduce much that feels new—and even that technology proves largely worthless once the supernatural forces kick in. We know from the genre playbook that almost no one is walking out of these woods alive. In a different year I might have given the movie more credit as a competent soft reboot. But 2016 had already delivered a handful of stronger, more inventive horror films, which makes Blair Witch feel like a tired rehash of tropes executed more effectively elsewhere.
Ultimately, Blair Witch is a decent enough found-footage horror movie on a technical level. The woodland setting still carries an eerie charge, and a few of the set pieces generate real tension. Yet it arrives at a moment when the found-footage genre itself feels exhausted and in need of a long rest rather than another reboot. It is serviceable, occasionally effective, and almost completely unsurprising.
2/5
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