Blair Witch Review: What Works And What Doesn’t

For more on the critical reaction to Blair Witch, head to GameSpot sister site Metacritic.

Just when you thought the found footage sub-genre had nowhere else to go and nothing new to say… along comes this new take.

That same exhausted gimmick, innovative and immersive sixteen years ago, fuels this would-be scream fest in the woods.

Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett (director and screenwriter of A Horrible Way To Die, You’re Next and The Guest, all of which played TIFF) returned to the festival earlier this week to terrorize Midnight Madness with Blair Witch. We’d been talking for years about how we need to try to make a real horror film, because the lazy thing for us to do would be to just do another insane genre deconstruction film. Every point from the first film gets done again here, except now, each is leached of suspense: Gone is the fear of wondering whether sobbing, snot-soaked Heather will make it out of the woods alive.

Go scary camping because this Blair Witch jiggles with unwarranted goofiness and not enough horror except your unsettled stomach.

The premise is weak: James (James Allen McCune) decides a blurry image in a YouTube video is Heather, the sister who disappeared in the original film. 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. At the time of the film’s heavily hyped 1999 release, many frustrated viewers complained that “nothing happens”, lamenting the absence of something more concretely terrifying than some hanging twigs and piles of rocks.

So another group of aspiring filmmakers (including the younger brother of one of the characters from the original) decide to find out what really went down in those freaky woods.

The found-footage style was original when it was used with “The Blair Witch Project”. This is where Blair Witch kicks off, and those who have seen the original will quickly realize that the sequel follows nearly the exact same formula as the first.

However, all-in-all, “Blair Witch” was quite satisfying and made me think, this is what the first sequel to the original film should have accomplished. Wingard and Barrett push all the right buttons, letting the action outside of the camera’s lens help build up the terror.

The key to the original movie was watching the footage found after the disappearance. There aren’t many surprises in store for the audience, but that doesn’t mean the scares are not present.

An infinitely scarier prospect for some readers will be that there’s a new Bridget Jones movie.

Along with “The Following” and “Blair Witch”, Curry had a recurring role as a computer geek on “House of Lies” and as a paramedic on “The Tick”, a show that could become an Amazon series. Everyone else moved on from “Blair Witch”, with good reason, a long time ago. As night falls, the students realize the legend is all too real after they are visited by a menacing presence.