Director Report Card: Adam Wingard (2016)

9. Blair Witch

In 2015, it was announced that Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett were collaborating on a new project, entitled “The Woods.” The film was very mysterious, with only a vague synopsis released beforehand. Based solely on my love for “The Guest,” I put the new film on my list of most anticipated projects for the year, even if I knew nothing about it. At the 2016 San Diego Comic Con, we learned why info on this new project was being so closely guarded. “The Woods” was actually “Blair Witch,” a brand new sequel to the original “Blair Witch Project.” It was a great surprise, a genius marketing move that counteracted the natural skepticism that greets the announcement of any new reboot. The surprise announcement actually raised a considerable amount of hype, which might've worked against “Blair Witch” in the long run.

Ignoring the meta narrative of “Book of Shadows,” this “Blair Witch” is a direct sequel to the original. When Heather Donahue disappeared in 1994, she left behind a little brother named James. Twenty years later, he's now an aspiring filmmaker himself. When mysterious footage, found in the Burkittsville woods, is posted to Youtube – seemingly showing a female figure – he becomes inspired to investigate. Along with a pack of friends – best friend Peter, his girlfriend Ashley, and mutual friend Lisa – they drive up to meet two local Blair Witch fanatics, Talia and Lane. They soon hide into the same forest Heather disappeared in. Soon enough, James and his friends begin to experience the same bizarre phenomenon, capturing it all on their cameras. 

The scariest thing about the original “Blair Witch Project” wasn’t the disorienting camera work, the lore built up around the titular entity, or the suggestion that the whole thing was real. It was the way the film emphasized a simple fear: Getting lost in the woods. Wingard’s “Blair Witch” definitely understands this, to a degree. The forest location - looking very lush and green in color, in contrast to the original’s stark black-and-white - is large and imposing. Once the characters are adrift in the trees, it becomes very easy to believe they won't be coming back out again. They feel alone out there and, in its best moments, "Blair Witch" understands that sense of forested isolation. 

The problem with Wingard's "Blair Witch" is, for every smart move it makes, it makes a misstep. The original "Blair Witch Project" was one camera, one camera person, the entire time. This further built up the illusion that the movie was genuine found footage, creating full immersion in the story. This "Blair Witch," however, cuts constantly between multiple cameras. I hate it when found footage do this. It's cheating. How are we supposed to believe the footage is "found" if someone's clearly edited it together from different sources? Does the Witch have a copy of Adobe Premiere out there in the woods?

Of course, the real reason "Blair Witch" utilizes multiple cameras is it was a 5-million-dollar studio production, not a 20,000-dollar underground film made by college students. It was shot in British Columbia, not in the actual hills of Maryland. (Something anybody who's ever actually been to Burkittsville will notice.) This allows the movie to explore some of the bigger concepts the original could only hint at. Such as the sense of temporal displacement the characters experience in the woods. That plays a big role here. Hours pass quickly and nights stretch on forever. People disappear for an hour but it's felt like days to them. Honestly, it's a cool idea the sequel hammers a little too hard. Despite the constant discussion of time being disturbed, the viewer never actually feels out-of-sorts. 

The bigger budget also allows for far more elaborate special effects. A moment much touted in the trailers has the campers' tents being snapped off the ground and pulled into the air. The horrors only suggested by the original are depicted here in full CGI. The makers of this "Blair Witch" could afford to fill an entire forest clearing with stick men of varying sizes. (Which, perhaps, lacks the subtly the original execution had.) They could also show what happens when one of those stick men is broken, a person snapped in half at the same time the twigs are. 

One could argue that, perhaps, bodily dismemberment and computer generated monsters doesn't have much to do with what made the original "Blair Witch." And they'd be right. But, occasionally, Wingard and his team do engineer a scary moment. A hiker injuring their foot early on becomes a reoccurring concern, resulting in some cringe-inducing scenes involving infections and pus. "Blair Witch" has excellent sound design and this is important. The scariest scenes, the ones that most invoke the original, involve isolated characters beset by unsettling sounds. A chase through the dark woods, a noisy interruption in a tent, or a shaky climb of a tree manage to generate some suspense. Largely thanks to the shrieking sounds of the unknown just off-screen.  

Yet Wingard's "Blair Witch" faces a problem that also plagued the original. How do you make people wandering around, lost in the woods, cinematic? Wingard and Barrett up the cast from three principal characters to six. As in the original, inevitably conflicts emerge among the cast during such a stressful scenario. Yes, there are scenes devoted to assholes arguing in the woods. The reveal that Blair Witch fanboy Lane faked at least some of the spooky shit that happens early on further pushes a wedge between the team. Unlike the original, where these interactions felt like genuine panic, these moments feel like totally deliberate attempts to escalate circumstances. 

The truth is I never care about any of these characters. The movie tries. Josh is haunted by the disappearance of his sister and this drives him further into the woods. In the end, it's what convinces him to go into the Witch's lair. Yet the other characters are cyphers at best. The pre-camping trip scenes, of the gang hanging out in a bar or goofing off in their hotel room, do not invoke much empathy. These scenes exist more to establish bear minimum relationships - Peter and Ashley are boyfriend/girlfriend, Josh and Lisa have UST - and introduce gimmicks like the camera drone. All of this stuff will be important later but it never gets us emotionally involved in the story. 

When you read the behind-the-scenes story behind "Blair Witch," you see that Wingard and Barrett were preoccupied with making the sequel as scary as possible. Ignoring that the original functioned more on atmosphere than scares, they pack "Blair Witch" with a lot of jump scares. And as his segment in "V/H/S/2" proved, Wingard is not very good at jump scares. Repeatedly, he has people leap out of the shadows at someone, accompanied by a loud noise on the soundtrack. The sequel does this so much that one of the characters even asks someone that they stop doing that. It's a cheap way to constantly make the viewer jump and quickly grows annoying. 

Worst yet, "Blair Witch" indulged in a cliche of the found footage genre that the "V/H/S" films pointedly avoided. While running through the woods, on several occasions, the cinematography lapses into incoherent shaky-cam. Why would a (comparatively) big budget sequel that breaks the one-camera rule of found footage so much delve into motion-sickness-inducing shaky vision? One can only assume it was a deliberate move, another way to induce confusion and hopefully panic in the viewer. It doesn't work and, instead, sticks out badly. 

Yet even this is not the worst mistake "Blair Witch" makes. As Josh and Lisa return to the house glimpsed in the original's conclusion, "Blair Witch" started to suck me in. There's some claustrophobic thrills in a scene where Lisa is trapped in an underground tunnel. The film smartly brings things around, to the found footage discovered in the sequel's first scene. Just as things are ramping up and I was thinking maybe this would work, "Blair Witch" does the unthinkable: It actually shows the Witch. Completely violating the "fear of the unseen" principle that the original was built on, we get a look at a blurry and long-limbed entity. This is even after a character says you'll drop dead if you look directly at the Witch. I get wanting to satisfy that curiosity but actually revealing the Witch, the definition of a villain never meant to be seen, so completely misunderstands everything that made the original effective. (Barrett would later try to claim this entity wasn't the Witch but come on. An early scene even references Elly Kedward having her limbs stretched.) 

In the run-up to the "Blair Witch's" release, Wingard and Barrett would talk about how they got many reboot offers after "You're Next." (He was within inches of directing the "Halloween" reboot, for one example.) It's easy to see why they would choose to helm "Blair Witch," considering the obvious influence it had on their "V/H/S" contributions. Despite both clearly being big fans, it's surprising that their "Blair Witch" seems to miss some the point of the original. The sequel still more than made back its budget at theaters but proved a disappointment to Liongates. Perhaps the Blair Witch wasn't as relevant in 2014, after twenty years of rip-offs and would-be successors. Maybe the public was still burned by "Book of Shadows." I think there's a way to successfully reinvent the iconic brand but it should involve returning to the zero budget, guerrilla production roots. Trying to retrofit "Blair Witch" into a traditional studio found footage flick, instead of remembering what made the original special, is why this "Blair Witch" is ultimately a failure. [Grade: C+]