Well I’ve talked about so many found footage movies that no one cares about that I guess it is time to discuss one that people actually might want to hear my thoughts on. The Blair Witch Project is a widely regarded masterpiece in the found footage horror genre and I’m not going to pretend that I have some new hot take on it that will generate controversy or interest. It’s a really good movie and I would suggest watching it to anyone interested in found footage movies and/or horror movies. I actually saw this pretty late in the game for when I started watching found footage movies and it kind of changed my view on the genre when I did. Everything Blair Witch Project did was so influential on many filmmakers that followed and I realized only on my initial viewing how many movies I had seen that took concepts, premises, even entire sequences from the movie and just repackaged them. It was almost more interesting as a historical piece of film than as one you would watch for entertainment. Luckily I have been able to watch the first movie a couple more times since then and I am happy to share my thoughts about it with you! Also I will be dropping spoilers. Read at your own risk.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez

 

The Blair Witch Project may not be my favorite found footage movie ever, but it seems to be almost made for me specifically. It has everything that I love, a focus on urban legends, suggestive horror, perfect escalation of situation, reasonable character conflicts and mythology just bursting at its seams. I’m getting ahead of myself though, first let me explain what The Blair Witch Project is before I go into more detail. The Blair Witch Project is a documentary-style found footage movie about a group of young folk, the leader Heather, the camera guy Josh and Mike the sound guy, who decide to make a movie about the Blair Witch, a local legend in Burkittsville, Maryland.After conducting numerous interviews in town, they hike through the nearby wilderness to get firsthand footage of locations that feature in the legends of the town. Things go wrong in the woods and the trio end up lost, trying to find their way out while encountering some strange phenomenon and dealing with the growing disagreements with each other regarding their situation.

I adore the interview segment at the beginning for so many reasons. Urban legends are some of my favorite scary stories and this film succeeds at keeping that flair that local legends have while still being very vague. Still though, you can piece together essentially what the stories about the Blair Witch are, that she’s this legendary figure from colonial times whose ghost/spirit/witch essence haunts the Black Hills and that some people make a connection between her and murders committed during the 1940s. It’s all vague and basic and I really like how they don’t try to over complicate things or over explain what is going on. It leaves a lot more mystery later on when things start to happen that the group can’t easily explain.

After getting the interviews done the group spends a night relaxing and then sets off into the wilderness, where things quickly begin to sour. Trouncing around the woods takes a toll on the group and things get even worse when they begin to hear spooky things during the nights. These spooks are quickly compounded by more and more spooky things that the group sees, and by the disappearance of Josh. These spooks are hard on the group, with everyone arguing about how they’re lost in the woods and what they should do about it. Mike and Heather seemed to clash the most and now they’re trying to work together to find Josh, or figure out what happened to him. This all leads to an incredibly tense and iconic climax at the supposed home of the aforementioned murderer that ends with no explanation of what happened to the group. I love it.

I’ll talk about why I enjoy this movie so much in a moment but I’ll start off by saying something that I don’t talk about nearly enough and that is that I actually found this movie scary. Surprise surprise, a horror movie that is scary, but seriously I’m not trying to brag, but most horror movies aren’t that frightening, especially the numerous bad ones that I’ve covered. The lack of explanation is why a lot of the movie works so well, it allows your own mind to conjure up why this particular thing is scary for you. The whole thing just shows a great understanding of the psychology of horror and strangely the suggestive nature of the horror in this film was never really continued in the other movies.

I absolutely love the look of the movie, it has this stylistically bad quality where it sometimes looks like crap and is filmed oddly, but it all makes sense in context of the movie and really convinces me of the authenticity of what is going on, I know it isn’t real, but the production values and the natural flow of dialogue help this whole thing just feel like a bunch of people in the woods, which is exactly how it is supposed to feel. That’s why the scares work so well, it feels like a bunch of people walking in the woods and slowly losing their minds and that is a scary idea for me. Hell, there isn’t even any confirmation that something supernatural is happening, they could all just be lost!

Although some found footage movies have surpassed it, The Blair Witch Project is one of the best of the style, a character-driven masterpiece of tension and paranoia. I love it, you should watch it.

 

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (200)

Directed by Joe Berlinger

 

After the insane box office success of The Blair Witch Project it is no surprise that a sequel was quickly rushed out, but what is surprising is just how different this movie is than the original. Book of Shadows is NOT a found footage movie, it doesn’t continue any storylines found in the first film and most of the movie does not take place in the Black Hills, although it is set near the town of Burkittsville and the characters do go into the Black Hills briefly. This story takes pieces from real life news reports and movie reviews of the first film and presents them at the beginning of the film to set the stage that this is set in a world where the movie was released in theatres and there is some controversy as to whether or not the events of the film actually happened. Everything starts by presenting the town of Burkittsville and how it has changed due to the popularity of the first movie and what the reaction has been to this change. It’s a clever way to pivot into the main storyline, which is about a group of people going on a ‘Blair Witch Hunt’ walking tour of the Black Hills, each member of the group doing so for their own reasons.

It is a rather diverse group, with two of the people writing a book on the Blair Witch and hoping to investigate the legends, another member being a Wiccan who hopes to commune with the spirit of the ‘Blair Witch’ Elly Kedward (which is an amazing idea that could never go horribly wrong), and a Goth lady who is there because she liked the movie. While in the woods they come across another group on a different Blair Witch tour and send them off to Coffin Rock while our heroes decide to party the whole night, drinking and smoking pot and having fun times generally. In the morning their campsite is trashed and the academics’ notes, which included original documents that they brought into the woods for some reason, are torn up and strewn about the site. The cameras set up the night before are destroyed but they manage to find the tapes right before Tristan, one of the academics, has a miscarriage, and they all go to the hospital with her. After she leaves the hospital they all retire to the base of the tour leader and comb through the footage to see what happened the night before. Once they start seeing strange things in the footage the group begins to get rather suspicious as to what everyone else was doing during this evening they can’t remember.

I really like the setup, I like how different this is from the original in both plot and storytelling with the style of the film being completely different than the one that came before it, with this movie presented also as sort of a documentary but one dramatized from police reports and footage and whatnot. These all sound like good things so that means the movie is good, right? Well, not really. For everything the movie does right is does another five things wrong. The cast here feels a little more memorable but that’s only because they feel more like stock characters than fully realized people and that makes being invested in their issues somewhat difficult. That may also be because of the acting though, as the performances range from competent to pretty flat and no one rises above that for the most part. There isn’t any of the raw authenticity like in the performances of the first movie and that isn’t helped by the dialogue being just okay and not all that interesting.

What’s really odd about the movie is its strange editing and score. There is an abundance of hard rock/metal in the score and when that gets coupled with the occasional glimpses we see of horrible brutal murder, it starts to feel more like a bad music video than a horror film. This is especially bizarre when you remember that the movie is supposed to be a dramatization of real life events so I have no idea where this kind of documentary would play, certainly not on network TV.

One of the things I like the least here is how the horror elements have switched from suggestive, where we don’t get the full picture of what happened and we have to put the pieces together while dealing with all these strange happenings, to a more straightforward style of just showing us things we should be frightened of. For example, once everyone gets back from the woods, most characters begin seeing or hearing things that aren’t there, and while these sorts of things were implied to have happened in the original we never actually saw those things in that movie, letting the audience wonder whether or not this is really happening or if it was imagined. But here we’re just shown the visions that everyone has and we hear the sounds that they hear and it just isn’t as spooky as being left in the dark on some of this stuff, especially when the visions can be kind of cheesy. The backwards walking girl in particular is kind of silly. And that isn’t a word I should use when I discuss a horror movie.

Even though Book of Shadows does some interesting stuff with its premise, I can’t say it is a good movie. I don’t hate it or think it is terrible, but it didn’t follow through with the interesting things in its setup. I can say though that at least nothing about the original movie has been ruined here and the stuff that doesn’t work is largely new things that they were experimenting with. I’d call it a noble failure. Also no one ever brings up the Book of Shadows.

 

Blair Witch (2016)

Directed by Adam Wingard

 

This sequel is a lot more in line with what I would have expected Book of Shadows to be. Blair Witch (2016) is a found footage movie that is a direct continuation of the original’s storyline by way of it being about Heather’s brother who decides to go to the Black Hills to look for her after new footage that appears to show her is posted online. Gathering a group, which includes the two locals who posted the video, they all head out into the Black Hills ready to track down Heather (even though it’s been like twenty years since she vanished). Predictably, bad things begin to happen once they’re in the woods for a few days.

More than just a sequel, this is pretty much just a remake of The Blair Witch Project with modern day horror sensibilities. Let me put it a different way, there are a bunch of jump scares in this movie, and if hearing that makes you think, “But doesn’t putting in jump scares negate everything that was supposed to be scary about the first film?” then congratulations, because unlike the people who made this movie, you are sane! The first forty or so minutes are more or less a remake of the first film, but with a bigger and more annoying cast, while the second half of the movie completely goes off the deep end, diving into Evil Dead levels of woodlands-based terror so unsubtle I was completely floored by what I was seeing. The spirit and understanding of what made the Blair Witch Project great is just not in this movie.

I’m not trying to be over the top with this, but I have to speak from my perspective as someone who really enjoyed the first movie and found some redeeming qualities to the second, I just think that if a movie has a scene where a woman is standing holding a camera up to her face and then three people in a row rush at her and shout, making her jump and freak out, that this movie should not have Blair Witch in the title. It isn’t just jump scares though, but a complete shift in how horror is presented to us and how the Black Hills are presented to us that really irks me. Horror in The Blair Witch Project was always suggestive, with everything being presented as this puzzle to be solved, this thing that maybe you could understand if you studied it, but you don’t want to because there is something off putting and unsettling about it that isn’t overtly threatening but instead just creepy. Here everything just wants the protagonists dead. Including the protagonists because they make a lot of terrible decisions!

While crossing a creek, one of the protagonists cuts her foot and I thought this was just a nick, but it’s an inches long gash straight down the bottom of her foot. Instead of saying, ‘shit I guess I have to turn back and maybe go to a hospital,’ she just keeps going and her wound gets worse. This next scene is really gross so I’ll put it in brackets, if you are squeamish do not read it. I am serious, it is disgusting. Don’t blame me if you read it now. [She later on gets a parasite in the wound which travels up her leg and she has to pull this thing out while her leg is just oozing pus and blood.] It’s gross body horror and while I generally like body horror, I don’t think it fit the tone of the movie at all, it was just a thing that they thought would make the audience squirm a bit. That’s what all the scares are, just very traditional horror scares that don’t belong in this series.

This isn’t terrible but it would have been much better had the references to the first film been removed and this was presented as a completely unrelated horror film. Things here could have worked out in different circumstances, the performances are mostly good and the setting itself is fine, as well as some of the scares, it just needed its own identity rather than connecting itself to a movie it thematically has very little to do with. The pacing also feels very wonky because of how quick everything goes from mild problems to THE WOODS ARE TRYING TO KILL US. Also at the end of the movie you see the Blair Witch and I find that more offensive than any other problem.

Retrospective:

 

This is one of the strangest series of movies I have ever seen. The original was so good and the two sequels that followed were both bad, but in really unique ways! Never before have I seen this perfect dichotomy with sequels where one tries to do its own thing stylistically while still being in line with the spirit of what came before, and the other conforms way too close to the style of the original while completely missing the point of what made the original great. I can see elements of the first in both movies, the meta nature of the first film plays really well in Book of Shadows where the continuation of the first film feels natural in that the plot isn’t about the missing kids, but about how the movie changed the town it was shot in, which is probably true in some respects, while the straight story continuation of Blair Witch (2016) seems to be trying to go back to the roots of the beloved original.

Neither really succeed at this and I think that’s probably for the best, better that the franchise die here than keep going until the reaaaally bad sequels come out. I can be pretty upset about how Blair Witch (2016) disrespects the legacy of the series, but really, the idea of making sequels to the Blair Witch disrespects the legacy already. And while I don’t love either Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 or Blair Witch (2016), they both do have some redeeming features. Book of Shadows has an original storyline that is completely distinct from the first film and does take the series in a bold new direction, featuring a lot of things based on the original without just copying them and being more of a slasher movie than the first, but it feels alright because it is so stylistically distinct from the first. Blair Witch (2016) had a lot of elements that could have worked in a different series or even if some of the sequences were edited out to give a better sense of pacing, especially the ending where, in a different series, it could have been an interesting climax and not this weird pseudo-fanservicey negation of everything good in the movies.

Really though, it isn’t the fault of either of these teams as to why these movies didn’t work. Making a sequel to a movie like The Blair Witch Project is an impossible task, trying to make a very similar movie would result in people saying you didn’t change anything and it’s just a cash grab while changing a lot would probably have a bunch of people saying that you went too far in the wrong direction, so in a perfect world neither Book of Shadows or Blair Witch (2016) would exist and those production teams could have worked on whatever movies they wanted. But we live in an imperfect world where artists have to answer to producers who want to make some cash. Still though, even if I am not a huge fan of the latter two movies, I can still appreciate that they have their own feel to them. Book of Shadows needs some fine tuning and Blair Witch (2016) needs to be in a different movie series but I could see this two becoming good movies with some retooling.

Really, the only logical way for this series to proceed is by each new movie having a completely new style of filmmaking, a new tone and plotline. I desperately need to see the science fiction adventure where humans leave Earth and put a chunk of a random nature preserve in a biome on the ship with them and then just have that be the Black Hills so we can finally get the Blair Witch in space. Maybe a Noir prequel where bootleggers hide out in the Black Hills while evading the cops and stumble upon the Blair Witch stuff completely accidentally. How could humanity survive without a Blair Witch musical? It could also be a period piece about how Elly Kedward was banished from her home in Blair!

Seriously though there are some interesting differences between the movies, particularly in how the Black Hills are presented. In the first one it is ambiguous if the hills are even haunted, making it perfectly possible that everyone just had a bad sense of direction and was unlucky. If they were haunted then the haunting was a lot more subtle than it was later presented as, giving us land that seemed inhospitable but not hostile, presenting challenges to the group, maybe the escalation was due to some kind of failure on their part? Maybe both statements are true and they became lost in a haunted forest that just wanted them to leave. That’s the best part of this movie, there are a many possibilities and it is fun to try and figure out what really happened.

In Book of Shadows the Hills are much more hostile, apparently spurring the drunk and high revelers to acts of despicable violence, but it is unclear if this is the natural state of these woods or if a spell cast on those grounds provoked the spirit of Elly Kedward to take a particular interest in this group. It is heavily implied that the spirit of the Blair Witch did take special interest in the group but is far from straightforward as to why. One of the members of the group did try to contact Kedward so she could become her ‘mentor,’ but again it is unclear as to what effect this had. The supernatural torment of these people goes far beyond what happened in the first film, with the group being controlled by unseen forces and then later on having their perceptions altered and in some cases even their actions. These are all very hostile acts but we see that many people go into the woods and are probably unharmed, so this is a bit up in the air.

Things are a bit different in Blair Witch (2016). Here anyone who stays in the Black Hills after sundown is subject to quite terrible retribution from whatever lives therein. Here the forest hates you. It wants you dead. Cut your foot and you’ll get monster parasites. Be near a tree and it could be pushed onto you. Set up a tent and that tent could be sucked into the air by unseen forces. It is bad news bears. There is an almost comical escalation, especially when the CGI Blair Witch begins stalking the folk through the woods and into the spooky house in the middle of the forest. Also its revealed that the witch directly talked to Parr to get him to kill the kids and people just become possessed by her sometimes. It’s all very obvious. Not a ton of wiggle room and judging that this is 20 years after Blair Witch Project, what the hell happened in those decades between movies? Did the continuing environmental degradation piss off the witch? Is this all spiraling out of control because of the events of Book of Shadows? There are no answers. Only questions, which I guess does bring us full circle back to the first movie, good on you Blair Witch (2016).