The on-camera trio’s footage, famously "recovered" after their fictional disappearance, unlocked what was more or less a new horror subgenre: found footage. It’s also the gold standard for successful viral marketing - so successful that many people still don’t realize the film isn’t actually based on a true story.
Filmed on a shoestring budget, it remains one of the most profitable films of all time, and directly influenced the film that currently holds that record, Paranormal Activity. Its story and iconic scenes have been parodied, homaged, and ripped off endlessly over the years.
The Blair Witch Project is one of the most influential horror films ever made. The Blair Witch Project established the found-footage formula Of course, we owe that cliché-strewn path to the Blair Witch to begin with. These people are all too much nothing to even inspire feelings of annoyance that they’re carrying us down the most clichéd horror path known to man. Wingard and Barrett seem to have left their usual ability to make us love and root for characters back at the roadside. The ostensible forest guide, Lane ( Wes Robinson), issues haphazard and useless warnings that the witch is a take-no-prisoners kind of gal, but these make no sense given that he’s entered the woods himself. The tension and character interplay that defined the original film is nowhere in sight here: Characters have no memorable traits, and there’s no particular significance to any of their interactions. (We care about them even less than James does.) A pair of locals get kicked out of the group after faking the famous Blair Witch stick signs another character is immediately down for the count after encountering a weird, possibly alien parasite whose connection to the witch is never explained. The group of friends who venture into the woods with James have no personalities to speak of and mostly serve to be quickly dispatched. Even if we assume that the previous Blair Witch sequel, Book of Shadows, never existed in this universe, it makes no sense for an obsessed family member to be so ignorant of Heather’s final footage that he calmly repeats all her mistakes. Yet James also seems to take no awareness of the events his sister experienced into the woods with him. We know James is obsessed with finding Heather, still alive, after 20 years because the script tells us so repeatedly. His search - conducted with laconic aplomb by an utterly uninterested McCune - drives Blair Witch’s flimsy excuse for a plot. Heather’s younger brother James ( James McCune) was 4 when she died and is now determined to find answers to her death by repeating her trek into the woods. Blair Witch’s characters are vapid and inconsistentīlair Witch gives us a new set of characters with a strong link to the original film.
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This inconsistency, combined with lackluster acting, a confused narrative, and formulaic plot beats, results in a movie that contributes nothing new to either the Blair Witch mythos or the vast landscape of found-footage horror. The result is a frustrating lack of narrative cohesion that relies too heavily on tropes the original Blair Witch Project codified. Thus, he lives in a world where horror movies - like the one in which his sister unwittingly appeared- are real, but he continually acts like he doesn’t. But director Adam Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett, the creative team behind the Project’s latest sequel, have done their best to keep their characters ignorant.īlair Witch’s main character is the brother of Blair Witch Project’s Heather, which ties him directly to the events of The Blair Witch Project. The protagonists of Blair Witch, in theaters this weekend, should know what awaits them in the woods.
The story is no less terrifying because we know it well: They can’t see the handprints on the wall until it’s too late. Heather’s determined refusal to turn off the camera means that their subsequent psychological and spiritual collapse beneath the witch’s vengeance is spectacularly captured on film. Heather continually Hermione Grangers her hapless friends deeper into the woods outside the small town of Burkittsville, Maryland, searching for answers to the folkloric mysteries of the Blair Witch and the history of shocking murders and disappearances that plague the woods she’s said to inhabit. Actors Heather Donahue, Mike Williams, and Josh Leonard march into the woods with the naive hubris of an entire pre-9/11 generation, confident that they can’t stray too far from safety or civilization. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project.
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