

How he gets to that conclusion I’ll never understand, particularly as she disappeared when he was just a toddler! James is the brother of Heather, the woman of the original who went missing in the woods around Burkittsville, He finds a video uploaded online that shows footage of the house at the end of the first movie & a reflection of a person in a mirror that he deduces may be his missing sister. You’d almost believe that this was a remake if it wasn’t for the paper-thin storyline that gets this group into the woods. Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows had more advancement in plot then this. It’s the same stories repeated in a less interesting way but with added arguments about the facts. There is no exploration of the lore, no added titbits for the viewer to mull over. You’re here for the nostalgia factor so here is the exact same film with less memorable characters, no tension & some of the worst jump scares I’ve seen in a long time. It has a chance to be a new kind of found-footage, one that doesn’t try to give you motion sickness or worsen your eyesight as you squint into the darkness on screen.īlair Witch takes all those potential lessons & simple wipes it’s ass with them. It has a chance to not fall into the same pitfalls that have plagued the sub-genre for years. A lot of people are going to love Blair Witch, I hated it.Īny found-footage horror in 2016 deserves to be put under the microscope more than any other because it has the chance to learn from the mistakes made by the films that came before it. There is no originality left in cinematic horror, these movies are geared towards a casual audience that compare quality with the number of times the movie makes you jump. The importance of building scares, not just throwing things at the screen to make you jump while simultaneously re-threading the same ground walked by a hundred movies before.

Many horror movies, particularly those within the found-footage territory have lost sight of the importance of subtly. What it does get right though is its subtle scares & well built tension that culminates in a final few minutes that terrify. It hasn’t aged well & on re-watching it becomes painfully obvious just how little actually happens throughout. The Blair Witch Project can be rightly considered a classic, in that it changed horror significantly. The early rise of the found-footage sub-genre can be traced back to The Blair Witch Project & many haven’t forgiven it for that. The first to show just how much money could be made from such basic budgets. It was, however, the first to push it into the mainstream. The original Blair Witch Project film came out in 1999 but contrary to what many believe it wasn’t the ‘first’ found-footage movie.
