PARANORMAL PANOPTICON
Blair Witch has many angles
There are too many found footage movies for each new one to occasion a reassessment of the genre. But given that the style was invented by The Blair Witch Project way back in 1999, the new Blair Witch sequel-reboot sort of invites us to give reassessment a try. Shall we?
For one, a lot has changed in 20 years. Nobody is required to hold a camcorder and point it at a subject of interest anymore. The layman cinematographers who double as the heroes of the new Blair Witch — James (James Allen McCune), Lisa (Callie Her- nandez), Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid) — command an arsenal of modern recording devices, from lightweight sticky GoPros to Bluetooth-like earpiece cameras to a no doubt prohibitively expensive drone, which can zoom around in the sky and offer what Lisa calls “low-budget camera shots.” Gone are the days of point and shoot. This is the found-footage panopticon.
A title card at the beginning of the film informs us that the footage herein has been assembled from material found on recording devices and memory cards retrieved from the Black Hills woods, though how anyone could be expected to have found something like 25 cameras, some of which are as small as a pack of Juicy Fruit, scattered around a two-mile radius with no discernible pattern among foliage and detritus of all kinds stretches the limits of plausibility. But fine, suspension of disbelief to the rescue again.
Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett have resolved the classic foundfootage problem. When evil of a mysterious sort descends upon the woods and paranormal activity, so to speak, begins to escalate, there’s no reason to doubt our heroes would continue diligently recording. They have to. Even the one traditional camcorder on hand — an antiquated miniDV thing that Lane (Wes Robinson), a tagalong local, has brought for complicated reasons — is put to sensible use during the Grand Guignol finale.
Of course the found-footage camera isn’t something only to be reckoned with conceptually. It also determines the film’s esthetic — and this is a problem Blair Witch hasn’t resolved.
The sheer number of cameras at Wingard’s disposal afford the film a certain variety of images and styles that found-footage films ordinarily lack, as we cut from shaky earpiece POV shots to static tree-mounted GoPros to the airborne drift of the drone in the sky. But that variety is marshalled toward a familiar shock-heavy slasher rhythm. You know that old horror-movie gimmick where the hero would be skulking down an o minous hallway when suddenly he’d be surprised by a pouncing, mewling cat? That sort of thing happens constantly here, amplified, irritatingly, by the narrow point-of-view swing of the ear-cams.
Blair Witch is another carnival of jump-scares, despite the technological leaps. Our heroes slink nervously through the woods, often alone in the dark, when suddenly — what’s that? — ahh! Oh, it’s just you, my friend, who inexplicably sprang out from the shadows without warning