Racing into the woods after ‘Blair Witch’
Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard show no fear in pursuing a game-changing movie.
Simon Barrett was totally at peace inside the ruins of the abandoned zoo. Our dusk hike cut short due to darkness, we’d detoured to the old Griffith Park Zoo. Because when you can’t get lost in the woods with the screenwriter for the new “Blair Witch” movie, crawling around in the deserted cages of a zoo left to decay for 50 years feels like a close second option.
Unafraid of the dark, the debris or the possibility of tetanus, Barrett was calm in the creepy old zoo house full of rusty nails, mangled, empty cages, even a discarded Game of Life playing board. And no, he didn’t consider that a warning. Instead, he happily pointed out a Pokéball spraypainted on the wall and climbed atop the hollowedout large-mammal habitat, the lights of Los Angeles flickering far away, and remarked that this whole operation reminded him of sneaking onto rooftops while growing up in Columbia, Mo.
Clearly, he understands the appeal of getting closer to the things that scare us.
“The weird, primordial fear of places that humans aren’t supposed to go, or places out in nature that are just, in some way, inherently wrong and scary, I think there’s some innate human fear of that,” Barrett says. “I don’t think a lot of films have done that well, but probably my favorite would be ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock,’ which has that feel of, ‘This is just a bad, weird place,’ for reasons that are so old that we don’t even understand them.” He pauses. “‘Blair Witch’ has that in spades.”
Barrett and his longtime moviemaking partner, director Adam Wingard, took on the treacherous task of resurrecting “The Blair Witch Project” with their own sequel, “Blair Witch.” It debuted last weekend with a disappointing $9.7 million (it was expected to make $19 million to $24 million), but it continues to bring in curious moviegoers — ticket sales were up to $11.2 million as of Tuesday — and with a $5million production budget it should have no trouble making at least a modest profit for Lionsgate, which put out the film.
The two knew it would be a challenge to take on the project. After all, the whole “lost in the woods” trope was tipped mainstream by the very film they were attempting to extend into the modern day.
Made for a minuscule $60,000 budget and a main cast of three actors, all working their own cameras, “The Blair Witch Project” was a genre game-changer when it came out in 1999. The indie flick made $248 million worldwide. But the real beauty of “The Blair Witch Project” wasn’t just the profit, it was the marketing phenomenon directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez caused when they endeavored to persuade the public that their film was 100% real.
The studio backed their efforts, doubling down on Internet message boards’ conspiracy theories, handing out “missing” leaflets at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, and shooting an additional documentary about the creepy woods where three kids mysteriously vanished into the wilderness.
A much-derided sequel “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,” was quickly made and released in 2000, largely without the input of the original filmmakers, and the “Blair Witch” story went dormant for more than 15 years.
It took Barrett and Wingard, who met in 2003, to pick up the story using their intuitive ability to blend the lines on traditional genre features. Their 2011 thriller “You’re Next” turned a “who done it” murder mystery into a “what’s going on, oh my God the blood the blood!” non-stop slasher mystery movie.
The pair’s next film, “The Guest” starring Dan Stevens, rejuvenated the ’90s action thriller with a “Terminator”-style lead character you wanted to take home to meet the parents. This, along with a collection of twisted anthology shorts, put Wingard and Barrett in the category of new creators who excel at making things that go bump in the night.
“After we did ‘You’re Next’ and ‘V/H/S,’ Adam and I got offered every horror sequel and remake you could possibly think of,” Barrett said.
“Blair Witch” is the pair’s first straightforward horror feature film. “We didn’t want to turn this into one of our horror-screwball comedy hybrids,” Barrett said. “We wanted to play it really straight and be respectful to the original and just deliver something scary. In some weird ways this felt like the next creative challenge for us. We’d already shown that we could not play it straight … with our ridiculous, postmodern genre mishmashes.”
The entry point to the story is James (played by James Allen McCune), little brother to Heather, the original film’s main character, whose terrified mug and blue hat became the staple shot for all the posters and trailers. James has been searching for his sister since her disappearance; thanks to an anonymous Internet tip he and a few friends head back into the woods to look for some answers. No surprise, things do not go as planned.
Once they finished filming, they faced a new challenge. How do you market a sequel to a movie that had a once-in-a-lifetime media campaign? Barrett had no interest in trying to resurrect a strategy that was conceived seven years before Twitter. “Our actors are on social media; they’re not dead,” he says. “We’re not trying to pretend it’s real at all. We didn’t try to pretend the VHS films were real.”
So they did the next best thing. They dropped the whole movie Beyoncé-style on an unsuspecting crowd during this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. Guests waiting for a first look at a mysterious movie titled “The Woods” instead got a surprise viewing of the brandnew “Blair Witch” sequel. The trick worked; the crowd went berserk. Excited word of mouth dominated ComicCon press buzz for a solid night, a pretty impressive feat for a small-budget horror movie going up against the likes of Marvel and DC.
“You don’t want to spend six months of people snarkily debating whether or not they should be excited about it on social media,” Barrett said. “It’s just here it is, it exists.”
But fans at Comic-Con didn’t have to pay to see the film. And when the opening box office numbers came in lower than expected, Barrett and Wingard took to social media to lick their wounds.
“Well, our horror film may have been a disappointment at the box office this weekend,” Barrett tweeted, “but at least we got overwhelmingly negative reviews.”
When Wingard responded, “bro I told you we shoulda made that movie about the boring guy who landed a plane in water instead,” many on Twitter reacted with outrage that the director would even jokingly insult pilot hero Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.
Wingard took to Twitter again to say he was kidding and that “Sully” director Clint Eastwood is “one of my favs of all time.”
Barrett also explained himself in a follow-up tweet: “To clarify, I’m hugely proud of our film. But if you can’t be sardonically maudlin on Twitter, I’m totally unclear what this site is for.”
At least the two can talk about their “Blair Witch” experience now. For 3 1⁄2 years they went to elaborate lengths to keep the film’s true nature secret — even the studio gift to cast and crew says “The Woods” on the watchband, not “Blair Witch.” There were safe scripts with names changed out. Barrett wrote fake scenes for character auditions, and he didn’t even tell friends and family what he was working on. “I’ve never been married, but I assume making this movie is like the closest thing I will ever experience to having a really serious affair.”
With the secrecy lifted, there’s nothing to do but let the movie play out in theaters. Meanwhile, as night settled onto the old zoo, Barrett talked about why so many people are afraid of the dark.
“You notice when you’re alone in the woods at night how loud the woods are,” Barrett said leaning into the darkness. “How both quiet and how loud the woods are, and that there’s none of the usual human or industrial chatter, which makes every moth landing on a leaf completely unnerving.”
meredith.woerner@latimes.com Twitter: @MdellW