BLAIR WITCH

“That was bullshit,” said the guy sitting next to us in the theater. It was two years ago and I didn’t blame him. He ordered a pitcher of beer with his girlfriend and (at first) seemed genuinely enthusiastic to watch an honest to god sequel to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. I know I was.

It’s not that BLAIR WITCH is a horribly bad film, it’s just another remake/retread of the first one, and a limp one at that. I’ve written before that filmmakers often see a lucrative first effort and see only the surface material for its success. For HALLOWEEN, every sequel concentrates on the murders and not the mystery of Michael Myers. In BLAIR WITCH, the filmmakers forget it’s the unknowable and unseen that’s the star. It’s the slow wear-down of civilized associates into panicked children who know they’re completely fucked. The first one won the lottery in its motives, themes and execution.

But it’s 2016 not 1999. And the sequel plays it straight. The first one felt like it took place in our reality; this one just takes place in the horror universe. The main character is obsessed with finding his sister (Heather from the first one) and takes some pals along with him. They go in with all the latest cameras and doo-dad’s: drones, GPS, walkie talkies and ear cameras. Once in the famous woods, they all snicker at the legends, only to discover they’re just traveling in circles again, eventually picked off one-by-one by the now (almost) visible witch.

A smart filmmaker would have played the James Cameron card. Take what the original filmmaker did and up the mythology, up the peril. If the main character’s sister got lost in those woods and you were as intimately familiar with the Blair Witch Project footage as we are, he would have sat down and strategized how to out-think and out-maneuver what the previous group went through. They got lost for days? Have a friend stay in town with the iPhone Find Friend app on — then tell the authorities with a helicopter “hey this is where they last were on the map”. Your sister kept waking up to wood trinkets by their camp? Read a book on booby traps and snares to see if it is a psycho hillbilly playing tricks. In the case it is a real witch? Bring some fucking crosses and a bag of salt with you. And by all means, you don’t direct your actors to snicker and laugh when someone says “no one here gets out alive”; especially when your sister — the one you saw footage of being hunted by some kind of unknowable thing — never came back from the place he’s talking about. If you’re a smart filmmaker, you think like the audience, be as smart as them — then have your bad guy slowly destroy their strategy. But what do I know? I didn’t even have a pitcher of beer to help me through it.