The woods go bump in the night

Valorie Curry in Blair Witch. Image courtesy Lionsgate.

There's a beautiful simplicity that drives The Blair Witch Project and its second sequel, Blair Witch. Abandon a few young people in the woods, state clearly from the get go those people will not survive, ramp up the paranoia and eeriness from the isolation, and spend 90 minutes messing with their heads and the audience’s in the process. Both films are effective at showing the resulting horror and the discomfiting notion that survival is both a fluke and an impermanent state of being and have several solid frights within their around 90 minutes of screentime. But the new version is missing a few key features that make The Blair Witch Project memorable 17 years later. It’s still a fun and often intense horror/thriller, but that trepidation might last for just one viewing.

One thing to say for Blair Witch is it is a conceptually interesting film even without the direct link to The Blair Witch Project. Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett have stewed up a goulash of a film, lifting elements not just from the original film but Evil Dead, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Vanishing and even a couple of concepts introduced in the first sequel in the series, Book of Shadows, to create their spin on the Blair Witch concept. It's a creation that's often interesting, and the collaborators are playful enough with their dialogue and a few bait and switch shots to add a small layer of parody underneath the horror. This is effectively their much bloodier and less grounded version of The Blair Witch Project, one in which the supernatural elements are more prominent and the quality of film has taken a step up in the approximately 20 years between the “found footage” making up the two movies.

Blair Witch still embraces its role as a follow up, inserting clips and a vital tie to the first film to provide logical and emotional motivations for sending six doomed souls into the middle of nowhere Maryland. This film aims to provide some clarity to the events depicted in the first run through, providing a comparatively concrete explanation to what happened in The Blair Witch Project. It also, at the same turn, tries to add to the legend created by its predecessor and retain a little mystery to its own oddness. Weird things happen to explain the strange things in the first film without receiving an explanation for themselves. It's an interesting strategy that requires some mix of confidence and ingenuity to attempt, although what they offer as answers are a little too easy, and the questions they pose a little too opaque.

What Blair Witch lacks is the sense of dread that comes from being lost in the woods for days at end. There's little of the hopelessness left over from the original, nor is there a true sense of desperation from the characters as they lose touch with their sense of selves and sanity. Strangely enough, while Wingard and Barrett give the woods malevolent personification, their forest is far less intimidating than the trees and shrubs shown in the first film. It's somehow more frightening to be in an environment that doesn't care about your existence rather than one that is out to get you.

The woods though are just an appetizer to the house featured at the end of the first film, a strange building akin to the protagonists' home in House of Leaves with unfathomable dimensions and doom around every corner. This is, though, the weakest part of the film, with so much time spent inside it draws away from the quality time spent outside the home. Usually this concept is reversed, but in Blair Witch, the confined space is less frightening than the open woods outside of them. The audience knows the situation will not turn out well for the characters stuck inside the death house, but the woods offer an existential dread that just can't be found in a tidy house. Also, while the house in the first film was a possible refuge from evil, it's presented as a trap in Blair Witch.

Those issues, along with some pacing problems tied to them, are why I don't think Blair Witch will hold up on a second viewing. It does serve its purpose for the first viewing, offering enough chills and queerness to keep audiences a few steps away from comfortable. It's a visceral delight with a few jolts of nastiness and a couple of rather brilliant bits of gruesomeness to keep you on your toes, and it might make you think twice about taking that shortcut through the forest on the way home tonight.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 89 minutes

Genre: Horror/Thriller

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Target audience: People with fond memories of the original film and horror fans prepping for October.

Take the whole family?: Even if it lacks the sheer terror drawn out from the original, this one has more than enough blood and gore to make it unfavorable to kids.

Theater or Netflix?: A late night theater trip would be pretty fun, although I'd rather tag team it with The Blair Witch Project and some beverages.

Is The Blair Witch Project a good horror film?: As a piece of horror cinema it is quite terrific. It's a great example of the slow burn, developing the strangeness and the isolation in the woods and creating scares from the environment itself to keep the audience feeling dread as the situation worsens. It also features what is more often than not the best horror movie monster; the viewer's imagination.

Watch this as well?: Aside from the The Blair Witch Project, flag down The Babadoo as well as the 2011 thriller You're Next; the latter shares the same writer/director team and is one of the highlights of the past decade in thrillers. For your own sanity, please avoid Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.