We're a little too old to fall for this shtick. Certainly not people who saw the original in 1999 like me. This week, we reviewed The Blair Witch Project, a mockumentary that follows three film students as they attempt to tell the story of the Blair Witch. I'm stumped as to who this was even made for. This isn't a spiritual successor to The Blair Witch Project, it's a found footage jump scare film for millennials who loved VHS and Paranormal Activity. It's funny that even with the new expanses in technology they still couldn't make this thing more interesting than something that was filmed with 1999 equipment. And don't expect to have the experience enhanced by any of these. This is literally a rehash of the original story with more characters and a flying drone with updated cameras. The worst part is Wingard and his crew don't even attempt to bring any original story elements to the table. The first segment of VHS and the religious cult segment of part 2 are both scarier than the entirety of this film. Did you see VHS? Did you handle it well? Congrats, you'll have zero problems sitting through Blair Witch. They replaced subtlety and dread with loud sound effects, jump scares, and video game glimpses of cliché figures. This completely failed to capture anything that made the original such a disturbing experience. It uses the exact same scare tactics that made those films so successful, bringing nothing but a completely derivative experience to the table. You want scary? You won't find it here unless you've never seen one of the Insiduous/Paranormal Activity/Conjuring clones to come out in the past 5 years. Watch it on a camping trip and you’ll probably never recover.So much for months of hype starting with The Woods trailer months ago which was eventually revealed to be this film. Watch it in a darkened cinema with good sound and it’s something altogether different. Watch Blair Witch in your living room and it just doesn’t work the same way. Outside, in reassuringly well-lit reality, you could think, “Brilliant! Half the time they just showed a black screen accompanied by the sound of twigs,” but things happen in the darkness, don’t they? A daytime thunderstorm makes me want to run outside and watch the lightning a night-time one has me cowering in bed, certain that lightning is going strike the house sooner or later. If you’d put me in a dark forest at that moment, I was ready to sprint through it in blind panic – pointy sticks and all. Instead my body was in panic mode: pulse racing, adrenalin pumping, senses heightened. I didn’t quite feel compelled to grip the arm of the person sitting next to me, but nor was I blithely thinking “it’s only a movie” this time. Rather than showing you terrifying images, it gave you the space to create your own. And much of the time, there wasn’t anything to see at all. The image quality and camerawork were authentically amateurish. The “found-footage” gimmick was a conviction-reinforcing novelty back in 1999, don’t forget, rather than a horror genre of its own. It set up a convincing everyday reality and furtively sneaked the horror in. There were no special effects or lighting tricks to retreat behind. That’s why The Blair Witch Project worked so well for me. The Blair Witch Project premiered as a Midnight Screening on Saturday, Januat the Sundance Film Festival, and opened Wednesday, July 14, at the Angelika Film Center in New York City before expanding to 25 cities at the weekend. Instead of getting scared, I start thinking about the way they’ve done the special effects or the lighting, or the entrails, while calmly prising the fingers of the person sitting next to me out of my forearm. Ghosts, psychos, dolls, devil-worshippers, people being forced to eat their own entrails – bring it on! Perhaps some people have an “it’s only a movie” mechanism that kicks in when confronted with horror imagery. I like to think of myself as pretty unscareable when it comes to horror movies.
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