Movie Review: Blair Witch

A couple months ago my friend and I went to go see Lights Out on the opening Friday night. A trailer started playing where it showed a couple of kids going into the woods and some scary things start happening to them, typical stuff. My friend leans over to me and says, “This looks exactly like The Blair Witch Project.” I smile and agree as the trailer ends with the title of the movie being revealed as The Woods. I did not think much of my friend’s comment, that is until the next day when it was revealed at the Comic-Con screening for this very film that it was actually a sequel to The Blair Witch Project (1999) titled Blair Witch. I gave major props to my friend and we both were super excited for this movie, as was most of the internet. I see The Blair Witch Project as a masterpiece in horror filmmaking and honestly one of my favorite horror films of all time, and although I was never expecting this belated sequel to live up to that, my expectations were still sort of high. I am sad to say that I should have set them lower, much lower. Blair Witch proves that lightning usually only strikes once and even though director Adam Wingard tried to capture what made the original so great, he ultimately failed at not only making a worthy follow-up to The Blair Witch Project, but a decent horror movie as well.

I usually do not like comparing a sequel to its predecessor, but that is almost impossible to do so here since this film is essentially telling the same story and using the same style as the original film. The setup is pretty simple – and actually works – as a group of college kids trek into the Black Hills Forest looking for James’ sister, Heather, who was one of the three kids from the original film. If you are going to do a sequel to The Blair Witch Project, this seems to be the way to go. Do not do what Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 did. Please don’t. The setup for Blair Witch works and there are some pretty decent storytelling techniques on display here as writer Simon Barrett is careful to foreshadow just enough that proves to have satisfying payoffs in the end. Whether audiences will be patient enough to wait for those payoffs remains to be seen, but they are there.

While the setup is interesting and good enough to justify this sequel’s existence, the execution is anything but. Director Adam Wingard has proven himself to be a solid horror director with credits including the delightfully violent You’re Next (2011) and the found footage anthology film V/H/S (2012). He has the talent to make a worthy follow-up to The Blair Witch Project, but fails to do so. He completely misses what made the original such a classic. That original film did not feel like a film, it felt real. Which is why people gravitated to it so much. It featured three amateur filmmakers walking around the woods with two cameras, and the most terrifying part of that film was that it felt so authentic. That movie was not worried about staging the perfect scare or getting the perfect shot, because that is not what would happen in real life, and that is the ultimate downfall of Blair Witch. Wingard has six characters, all of whom have cameras (some even have multiple), and he decides to stage his scares perfectly. It becomes increasingly annoying throughout the film as we are forced to cut to different character’s perspectives that it feels like we are watching an actual movie instead of a found footage one. Not only that, the characters do not feel like amateur filmmakers because they have so many different types of cameras. I understand that technology has advanced significantly in the past twenty years, but all of the advanced cameras and technology takes away from the characters and the realism of their situation. It all came off as fake, which is a far cry from what The Blair Witch Project came off as.

While the majority of the film’s runtime is a setup and does not feature all that many scares, I will say that the film’s final fifteen minutes or so is mostly effective. Much like the ending of the original film, this film puts its characters in some terrifying situations. As stated before, however, the fact that there are so many different cameras in play and we cut between different character’s perspectives really took me out of it. The end of The Blair Witch Project really gave us a limited view, which made it more terrifying because we did not know exactly what was going on, but here we are able to see more and the result is a little less terrifying. On its own though, the ending of this movie is pretty solid. It gives some answers to the overall mystery, but ultimately does leave the door open if they want to continue making more of these movies.

Overall, Blair Witch is such a sad disappointment. I was not all that intrigued when I was sitting in the theater and saw the trailer for The Woods, but then my excitement went through the roof when I found out it was a Blair Witch Project sequel. My excitement level probably should have stayed where it was when I thought it was simply The Woods. Hollywood did something similar earlier in the year when it gave us the surprise sequel 10 Cloverfield Lane, the difference being that that film was trying to be something drastically different from its predecessor, while Blair Witch tries to show that lightning can strike twice. This movie proves it cannot, and in a year that has featured so many great horror films, it is sad to say that Blair Witch is near the bottom of that list.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Scott Davis

Scott Davis is a recent graduate of Oakland University where he earned a degree in journalism. He worked for the student newspaper on campus, The Oakland Post, where he became the paper's managing editor. He also earned a minor in Cinema Studies at OU. Scott enjoys all things film and TV related, especially the blockbuster kind. He might be the biggest Christopher Nolan fan you know.

Latest posts by Scott Davis (see all)

• The Preview Reel: Incredibles 2 and Tag - June 13, 2018
• The Preview Reel: Action Point & Adrift - May 30, 2018
• The Preview Reel: Solo: A Star Wars Story - May 23, 2018