Well this came out of nowhere, didn't it? I mean, we'd known for a while that Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett were working on a film called The Woods which sounded potentially interesting, mainly because of the names attached to it for most people, and then all of a sudden at the San Diego Comic-Con in July they go and reveal that it's actually a sequel to The Blair Witch Project called, appropriately enough, Blair Witch. So of course, after I'd picked my jaw up off the floor and stopped making a high-pitched noise of excitement that was starting to bother the cats, I knew that I'd have to see it. An actual sequel to The Blair Witch Project (that hasn't been banished to the same universe as Highlander 2)? I was just sad I couldn't make it to Frightfest for the UK premiere.
So, in 2014 (20 years after Heather, Josh and Mike headed into the Burkittsville woods and never came out) someone uploads footage to YouTube that he claims to have found in the woods that seems to show someone with a camera running around a sinisterly familiar house in the woods. Heather's younger brother James sees this footage and believes that, somehow, his sister is still out there in the Black Hills, and so he and three of his friends set out to investigate, with one of them making a documentary on the whole thing as they go (because of course someone is). They're joined by the man who says he found the footage and his girlfriend, and so the six of them enter the woods to discover the truth. They think they're prepared for anything - they have GPS, walkie-talkies, a drone camera, earpiece cameras, static webcams and more besides. It doesn't take long, however, before they find themselves at the mercy of the forest and whoever - or whatever - the Blair Witch really is...
Motion Sickness alert: this movie has shaky cam. Once again, the bane of found-footage movies rears its nauseating head, but at least they've tried to minimize the problem this time by having so many cameras to take angles from (which is also a neat little cheat for putting in some more professional-looking shots in the film, such as the overhead shots of the woods with the camera drone which were really, really pretty). But eventually, once the film gets to the "running around in the woods in the dark and screaming" portion, the camera gets well and truly jiggly, so be warned.
So I suppose the big questions here are: (a) Is Blair Witch any good?; (b) Is it better than the original?; and (c) Was it worth the wait? My answers to those questions are, in short: (a)Yes; (b)Yes; and (c)Uhhh... Maybe. The film is good - it's tense, smart, atmospheric and I even had to close my eyes a couple of times because I didn't want to see what might appear on the screen (and also for one scene where one character pokes at their badly infected foot and ankle and you just know something nasty is going to squirt out). It's also far better paced than the original - in Blair Witch there are actual reasons for our six characters to start yelling at each other without any maps being kicked into creeks whatsoever and we have sinister things happening from all angles rather than the "one scary thing a day" schedule that The Blair Witch Project seemed to operate on for most of its running time. But after nearly two decades of nothing but vague rumours about one sequel or another that never came to anything, and then suddenly finding out that one is finally made, what we actually end up seeing will rarely live up to the expectations we've built up in our minds. I'm not saying the film is a disappointment; just that the hype that builds up around films like this is usually detrimental in the end as people expect too much of the film.
There are of course jump scares in Blair Witch; some are cheesy and predictable while others come at the right moments after suitable levels of dread have been built up. There is also a solid building on the lore presented to us in The Blair Witch Project - we get brief reminders of some of the more infamous nastiness that has occurred over the years without it becoming an exposition dump. It also takes some of the other bits of lore from the first film - the rock piles, the wooden "stick figures" hanging in the trees and the standing in the corner - and expands on them, with one scene in particular being quite horrifying in its sudden revelation. There is also a revelation at the film's climax that is played very shrewdly - our surviving protagonists don't even grasp what is going on themselves, but we do. It's a very good use of dramatic irony. Finally, I loved that, as things progressed, it became clear that the woods themselves were somehow alive (shades of The Evil Dead) or at the very least symbiotic with the Blair Witch herself, so that everything around our characters could no longer be trusted.
I had been wondering if Blair Witch was going to be my "best horror film of the year" before I saw it. Now that I have, I can say for certain that it's definitely in my top three, but I'm still undecided as to whether it beats out Don't Breathe for the top spot or not. Regardless, Blair Witch is a very good film, and a good sequel.
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