Ditch this witch
What an unnecessary movie. Seventeen years after The Blair Witch Project stormed Sundance and gave birth to the found-footage horror sub-genre — in which we watch grainy video purportedly filmed by victims of horrifying phenomena — this reboot comes late at the tail-end of our visual epoch flooded by smartphone clips, with handheld amateur images so abundant in our stream of perception that we no longer see the novelty or excitement in shaky pictures that supposedly contain gruesome scandals. It’s awful, but aren’t we seeing that almost every day online or in the news?
In the original The Blair Witch Project, I wrote on these pages that the film made me feel as if I was visiting a cemetery — it was all about the invisible chill of dread. In this new Blair Witch, it’s as if you were thrown into a hysterical nuthouse, haunted by evil spirits but also by panicking, shouting young people who elicit zero sympathy. I wouldn’t wish them death, cinematic death of course, but at least for the witch or whatever to put an end to their misery, which is basically ours for nearly 90 minutes.
The premise: a group of people wander into the woods and are stalked by unseen dark forces. One of them, James (James Allen McCune) is the brother of Heather, the woman from the original Blair Witch Project. Another, Lisa (Callie Hernandez), is a documentary filmmaker and thus carries a number of small cameras, including a drone-mounted one. The bulk of images that we see is (supposedly) recorded from these cameras, gritty, shaky, lowres, including several shots taken while someone is running away from something. After contending with many strange occurrences, two of the trekkers get trapped in an abandoned house in the middle of the forest, where they’re assaulted by noises, shadows, voodoo symbolism, sudden appearances and disappearances, and other ghostly misfortunes.
Director Adam Wingard has fun throwing his characters (and us) into a
Blair Witch Starring Callie Hernandez, James Allen McCune Directed by Adam Wingard
disoriented frenzy. But all of this doesn’t cause anything below surface shock. After so many sensational false alarms and a pabannnggg sound attack, one of the characters says: “Would you stop doing that?” And the audience laughs knowingly. The final section in that bedevilled house may be slightly more imaginative than the rest, but it’s still not enough to rescue this 2016 film that feels more dated and jaded than its forebear that came out 17 years ago.