(This one’s probably going to be pretty spoilery for The Blair Witch Project, so if you haven’t seen that and are planning on it - and I would definitely recommend it, it’s really good - maybe hold off until you’ve seen that film.)
Some time back I wrote up one of my favorite horror films, The Blair Witch Project, which was striking (and profitable) enough to essentially kick-start found-footage as a narrative approach to horror film. It was lightning in a bottle - coming at just the right moment in the zeitgeist, using techniques more common to theater than film, and leveraging the still-developing Internet for a publicity campaign that profited from an audience’s credulousness to build up a lot of hype ahead of time. William Castle would have been proud. It wasn’t the first found-footage horror film, but it was certainly the highest-profile (and most profitable) one. Did I mention it was profitable? It was profitable. And the thing about profitable horror films is that studios invariably want to capitalize on them to keep the revenue stream going - sequels, prequels, reboots, franchises, whatever. Do it again, it worked the last time.
But here’s the thing - you can’t really capture lightning in a bottle twice, as demonstrated by Blair Witch, a 2016 sequel to The Blair Witch Project. This film attempts to recapitulate the original, but in doing so misses so much of what made the original film good. Instead, it manages to fall victim to all of the found-footage film cliches that emerged following the originals’ success and ends up being an inchoate, formulaic mess.
This film is about James Donahue - the younger brother of the original film’s Heather. He’s never really gotten over his sister’s mysterious disappearance 22 years ago, and he still holds out hope that she’s still alive somewhere. He’s even got Google alerts set up for things to do with her disappearance. Usually they don’t pay off, but then one day he gets an alert for a video uploaded to YouTube, taken from a cassette some people found in the Burkittsville woods. It’s grainy and shaky and degraded, but it appears to have been shot inside of a very old, very abandoned, very familiar house. Someone’s running through hallways, bolting doors behind them, and then there’s a quick glimpse of them in a mirror…and it looks like it could be Heather.
And that’s all it takes - James, his girlfriend Lisa, his best friend Peter, and Peter’s girlfriend Ashley gear up to head into the woods to look for her.
The footage we’re watching, we’re told, was recovered after the fact from DV cassettes and video capture cards found in the forest.
(Now that I think about it, a film from the perspective of Heather, Mike, and Josh’s families, still haunted and traumatized by their children’s disappearances decades later, done in the style of a more explicitly supernatural Lake Mungo could be a really interesting sequel. Good luck getting that made, though.)
But those are smart choices. This film by and large does not make smart choices. This film, released 22 years later, attempts to hit many of the same beats as the original and do so in a found-footage format. What this means is that it ends up drawing less from the power of the original film and more from all of the cheap imitators that came after. A lot of the conceits and scenes that worked really well in the original mutated into cliché over time as producer after producer tried to replicate the originals’ magic, missing what made it good in the process.
To start, James and company all decide that they’re going to make a foray into those woods themselves and as it turns out, Lisa and Ashley are film students. Because of course they are. So Lisa’s going to make a documentary about it. And so here we have cliché #1 - there’s no reason this has to be a documentary, but that provides a pretext for the omnipresence of cameras to capture everything. It made sense in the first film because the whole story was “film students go into the woods and don’t come out.” The whole reason there was a film was that these people were in the woods to film things. But subsequent attempts at found-footage films try to take other stories and shoehorn in reasons for the protagonists to be recording everything, whether it makes sense or not. Next on the cliché list is the obligatory tech rundown, including a drone camera and miniature earpiece cameras with built-in GPS. This is another thing I see a lot in mediocre found-footage films - a lot of fuss and detail made over the big arsenal of recording equipment and multiple cameras the protagonists have.
This has never struck me as anything more than a cheat - the original film shot everything using two cameras and one mic and DAT recorder for sound. That’s it. The whole point is that our perspective is imperfect and incomplete, but a lot of films miss that point and instead do everything but find a reason for one of their characters to just happen to be wearing a Steadicam rig. And then on top of that, there’s a segment where they go out clubbing while wearing their earpiece cameras for…reasons? In The Blair Witch Project, there’s a brief segment where the three of them calibrate the cameras while they’re drinking in their motel room, but that seems to have mutated into a need to have a scene in every found-footage film where everyone’s out partying while recording and it almost never makes any sense at all. It consistently misses the point that those elements made sense in the context of the original film, and mistakes them for obligatory gestures.
Another problem with this film (common to found-footage films) is that at no point does it feel like anything but a movie. The first film worked so well - as a horror film and as an example of found-footage film - because it was naturalistic in the extreme. Dialogue was almost entirely (if not entirely) improvised, it was shot on location, the actors were only given a daily outline of what had to happen in the course of the day’s shooting. How they got there was up to them, and their environment was manipulated to make their discomfort and exhaustion real to a degree. The whole thing was closer to improvisational theater than to filmmaking. By contrast, this film was entirely scripted, and it shows. The dialogue isn’t especially wooden or anything, but it definitely sounds like dialogue and not naturally occurring conversation. The emotions don’t feel as real or as raw either, with some exceptions toward the very end, but even then it’s sort of too little, too late. It’s not impossible to write dialogue that sounds like actual conversation and it’s not impossible to get performances that feel extremely naturalistic, but it’s a lot tougher than just writing a script, and I think there’s a certain suspension of disbelief that we employ when we’re watching conventional narrative films where we don’t necessarily expect naturalistic performances and dialogue. There’s a tolerance level for a certain amount of staginess. But if what we’re watching is supposed to be raw footage pulled from an amateur’s camera? Any staginess sticks out like a sore thumb. At no point does the dialogue or the performances feel like anything but a movie.
Arguably, any given film should succeed or fail on its own merits, but not only is this film a sequel to another film and thus inviting comparison on that basis alone, it also goes out of its way to try and replicate beats and moments from the original. The pretext here is that we’re watching footage recovered from a bunch of DV tapes and video capture cards discovered out in the woods, just like in the original (and like the original, this information is communicated in stark white-on-black title cards that aren’t the only instances of homage, but they’re probably the least distracting). And just like in the original, once our protagonists get into the woods everything starts to go wrong. Some of it goes wrong in exactly the same way it did in the first film, which doesn’t really work because we’re expecting it. What’s startling the first time is anticipated the second. Some of it goes wrong in far less interesting ways than the original as well. The filmmakers don’t just stop at having unseen forces menace the protagonists, as the film goes on they also include briefly-glimpsed monsters and body horror, all slathered over with a thick layer of jump scares. A big part of why the original worked so well was because it established a mood first, and took its time doing so. As a result, even the slightest strange thing - mysterious cairns, stick figures hanging from the trees - carried with it a real sense of dread. Here, they’re just sort of set dressing, a way to say “hey, remember this?” and just in case that doesn’t do the trick, every other horror cliché you can think of gets chucked in as well. This is not a film that builds a mood so much as it just keeps turning up the volume louder and louder in an effort to scare us.
That’s yet another way in which it’s in strong contrast to the original. The Blair Witch Project was a relatively quiet film, low-key, with tension simmering gradually over its runtime so it wasn’t really until the last act that things started getting intense. It was relatively quiet visually as well - lots of long, quiet shots, shots held on people’s faces, footage of the forest itself. This is not a visually quiet film - the footage is constantly interrupted by glitches (except when it isn’t, and then it’s often shot from angles and with a steadiness that shouldn’t have been possible with the camera equipment they had, which is awfully convenient), scenes invariably end with a blast of interference, someone yelling at someone else to turn their camera off, or the camera crashing to black. Lots of the footage, especially in the third act, is shot on the run while people are bolting through the woods screaming at the top of their lungs. It ends up being more irritating and distracting than anything else, a barrage of imagery that never really coheres.
There are a couple of things it does do well, to be fair. James and company make contact with Lane and Talia, two sketchy locals who uploaded the footage in the first place, and they ask to join up as our protagonists head into the woods. There’s tension there - you’ve got four city kids who have no business being out in the woods and the two locals who take the legends about the woods very seriously. and it isn’t clear how trustworthy Lane and Talia are. The friction between the two groups works pretty well and adds some ambiguity in places that would have worked in a quieter film. .The most effective element of the film (one borrowed from the original) is the way time seems to slip out of joint the deeper they get into the woods - it’s a relatively minor element in the first film, and there was as likely to be down to increasing disorientation as anything else, but here they really lean into it in ways that work more often than they don’t. In those moments, it reminds me a little of an outdoorsy version of Grave Encounters at its best, though it also shares some climactic issues with that film as well. I think if they’d cut out some of the more blatant callbacks to the original and really made this a film about six people ending up someplace outside of time as we know it, really leaning into the desperation, isolation, and dread that come with that, then it might have worked. As it is, I think it just got included because it was in the first film (along with the cairns, the stick figures, someone who claimed to know where they were when they really didn’t, the abandoned house, all of it) and like everything else they just went bigger and louder and more obvious than the original.
At one point, a character says “we faked it because it’s real,” and I think that kind of sums up the problem. The original worked so well because its production methods emphasized realism to a degree that you don’t often find in film, and this film is very much fake in the sense of being artifice - it’s scripted, it lands on every found-footage film cliché you can think of, it leaves as little to suggestion as possible, and feels engineered from its first minutes. It’s a movie that treads the same ground that The Blair Witch Project did, but manages to forget everything that made that film so good in the first place. If it had been a conventional film narrative, well, I don’t know that it would have been good, but it would have had a fighting chance. As it is, it’s so clearly fake that it inspires nothing but annoyance.
IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon
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