Seventeen years after Heather Donahue went missing in the Maryland wilderness while searching for the Blair Witch, her kid brother James (James Allen McCune) is still desperate to find out what happened to her - and instinctively convinced that she’s still alive.
The setup, then, is simple enough, turning the events of the first film into something of a tortured family legacy for its principal new adventurer. The opening scene, in which grainy, grisly visions of terror from the original film’s climactic cabin in the woods are revealed merely as YouTube footage of questionable provenance, wrongfoots the audience in more ways than one: It hints at a deeper probe into the colliding realities, fantasies and fabrications that seemingly keep the eponymous legend alive, but Wingard has no interest in exposing, à la Joss Whedon, the rules of the enigma. Even as the tropes and techniques of “The Blair Witch Project” (whose creators, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, have executive-producer credit here) have become routine fodder for parody, Wingard and Barrett largely eschew any “Scream 2”-style bracketing of the original film’s lore in a more ironically knowing universe. A whole lot more than $60,000, the famously minuscule cost of the 1999 sleeper, has been spent on making “Blair Witch” look and feel as scrappily homemade as possible - faking it so real, so to speak - albeit with a little 21st-century help from drones, personal camera technology and a cracking, crunching studio sound mix that may just be the true star of the film.Īny viewers waiting for an ironic subversion of those basics, however, may be frustrated.
A significantly more accomplished and entertaining sequel than 2000’s woeful cash-in “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,” “Blair Witch” nonetheless reps something of a missed opportunity from Wingard and writer Simon Barrett, who so deftly and wittily updated 1980s horror form in their terrific, thumbscrew-tight features “You’re Next” and “The Guest.” The very title of the new film augurs a back-to-basics approach, significantly inflated budget notwithstanding, and it delivers basics in spades: a clammy-handed fear of the dark, ambiguously sinister pagan-style iconography, and so many thumpingly executed jump scares that even the characters call for a respite.
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