Who likes being scared? Blair Witch fans,
Blair Witch horror sequel delights full house of fans at Midnight Madness
“Who likes being scared?” TIFF Midnight Madness programmer Colin Geddes asked a capacity Ryerson Theatre audience early Monday.
Screams of assent rang out. But they weren’t loud enough for cryptmaster Geddes, who sets high standards for his fellow graveyard wanderers. “No, who likes really being scared?” Geddes prodded. The crowd response was more to his liking and also more appropriate to the occasion: the world premiere of
Blair Witch, the rebooted sequel to The Blair Witch Project, the haunted woods horror classic from 1999 that sparked the “found footage” movie genre and haunted a million nightmares.
Originally titled The Woods and secretly in the works for the past three years, Blair Witch is an attempt by two longtime horror collaborators, director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett ( The Guest, You’re Next, A Horrible Way to Die), to breathe life into the corpse of a franchise felled by Joe Berlinger’s DOA sequel Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows from 2000.
Berlinger failed because he tried to discredit and even send up the Blair Witch myth.
It had been made so believable by original writers/directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez that ardent fans still visit the small town of Burkittsville, Md., in pursuit of an ancient child-snatching crone they believe resides in the dark nearby woods.
Berlinger failed to realize that it’s this very myth that fires the imagination and sustains a narrative that otherwise would be little more than a lost-in-the-forest saga.
Set 20 years after the original story, Blair Witch pays all due respect to its predecessor, following the same format of young film documentarians tramping into the trees in search of answers and scary footage.
The expedition has been doubled, updated and complicated.
There are now six trekkers instead of three, two of them being Blair Witch believers Lane (Wes Robinson) and Talia (Valorie Curry), who found recent spooky video clips, which they’ve placed online, that suggest lost girl Heather from the original Blair trio might somehow still be alive.
Heather’s brother James (James Allen McCune) realizes the odds are against a family reunion, but “I need to at least try” to find his sister.
He enlists the aid of filmmaker Lisa (Callie Hernandez), friends Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid).
Together with Blair Witch freaks Lane and Talia, they enter the Maryland woods, which are actually B.C. woods, where the film was shot.
They bring with them such 21stcentury gadgets as GPS locators, mini ear-clip cameras and a drone camera, which emits an eerie whir as it hovers high above the woods.
As the questers soon discover, all the technology in the world is useless when you’re in a remote area ruled by an unseen supernatural presence.
One that’s bigger than ever and with a nostalgic yen for bizarre art projects.
The stickman tree hangings and weirdly piled rocks are back in abundance.
There’s a concession to the grossout obsession of modern horror standards: one of the questers gets a foot injury that becomes infected with an icky parasite.
And that wreck of a haunted house in the woods?
Maybe there’s more to it than we realized.
But for the most part Wingard and Barrett remain faithful to the simple original premise of modern kids encountering a horrific ancient entity, and a vengeful one at that.
There are more jump scares in Blair Witch than on a carnival funhouse ride, which is what the film begins to resemble
This includes the dizzying “shaky cam” effect of multiple cameras that always manage to catch something, even when thrown onto the ground by people running for their lives.
“This is a movie made to really get a jolt out of the audience,” Wingard told the Ryerson Theatre audience. He was right about that. There are more jump scares in Blair Witch than on a carnival funhouse ride, which is what the film increasingly begins to resemble.
The biggest difference this time is that most people aren’t going to believe the woodlands witch myth is actually true.
Even though Barrett joked about Blair Witch being “our first documentary!”
Moviegoers just aren’t as gullible in 2016 — or are they?
They can judge for themselves this week.
Blair Witch opens wide on Friday, with some late-night sneaks on Thursday.