Blair Witch… Again

       The movie I chose to go see was Blair Witch which movie is a sequel to the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project. The original film is about a woman named Heather who goes into the woods to make a documentary film about the legend of the Blair Witch. The 2016 Blair Witch film follows the same film making technique of a point-of view production. Also, the movie follows the theme that the characters are making a documentary, thus each character has a camera to show his or her point-of-view. This film also takes place in the same woods and just 17 years later. Although this film make sound appealing on paper, there are many flaws that make it different from the original.

      The movie starts out very calm and opens up with a group of friends. The main character is James Donahue who is a college student who was four years old when his sister, Heather, went missing. She is investigating the legend of the Blair Witch in the Black Forest hills near Burkittsville, Maryland. James recently finds a video on the internet of a haunted house and a woman who he says is his sister. It is then uploaded by locals named Lane and Talia who said they found the film in the woods. James asks his friends Peter Jones, Ashley Bennett, and film student Lisa Arlington who wants to make her own documentary of their experience and of James’ story to head out in the woods and camp out. After a few mysterious occurrences, they all agree they have had enough and start packing and head back to their cars. Then, after walking for hours, the group finds themselves at their original camp site and are forced to stay. Peter is awoken to strange noises and takes off running, causing a tree to fall on him. The next “morning” they discover that the sun has not risen and there are dozens of stick figures hanging from trees with real hair on them. Ashley wakes up and is furious about Peters disappearance. Talia offers no help to the situation and Ashley spitefully snaps Talia’s stick figure in half resulting in Talia snapping in half. They then hear a mysterious sound and the three take off running. Ashley gets separated and removes something strange from a cut she got earlier in the film. She then finds the drone that they had lost on the first day and tries to retrieve it from a tree, but she falls to her death and the camera shows her body being dragged off.  While looking for Ashley, it begins to storm and James and Lisa find the house they believe is from the video of Heather on the internet. James goes in even though Lisa begs him not to while Lisa stays outside and continues to scream for Ashley. However, everyone knows not to go in the big scary house.

             Although Blair Witch may fit the genre of a horror film, some may disagree that it doesn’t deserve it. A horror film to most people is filled with suspense, scare to the point of nausea, and should be enough to make your hair is on end. The movie itself has its moments of scare but they seemed to be the cheap ones such as thunder storms, a main character popping out of nowhere just to get a little jump out of the audience, or a tree branch falling. Brian Tallerico, a film reviewer, stated, “it sounds like a bulldozer is going through the woods… there’s nothing relatable creepy about that” (Tallerico). The loud noises made the most contribution to the scare level in the movie, but does not seem to be enough to give goosebumps or to make one shake. Tallerico also states, “ ‘Blair Witch’ has plenty of yelling, but not nearly enough that gets under your skin” (Tallerico).  The loud noises definitely give a little scare and sometimes enough for you to jump, however, a good horror film is not all about the cheap scares. As Tallerico said, “enough to get under your skin.” All and all it was simply a movie with little horror, but it is not enough to be called a horror film.

      Overall, I would have to give this movie a poor review. However, there were a few positive things about this movie that made it a little more enjoyable.  First, the actors really sold the movie and gave it a fairly realistic feel. Another strength in this film was the realism of the sound effects. The audio in the movie was very life-like and created a lot of tension and suspense. However, the sound seemed to be some of the only suspense that was created in the film, which was one of the down falls of this film. The sound affects seemed to be the only source of scare in this film. There were more weaknesses, such as that the movie was created in a point-of-view shot which means that the movie was created as if we were inside the character’s head. In the film, they are creating a documentary about the Blair Witch and each character has a camera and microphone attached to their ear. This may seem like a good idea at first, but as a viewer it was very nauseating to watch and understand what’s happening. There are times in which the characters are running or experiencing something traumatic and as they are doing so the camera follows making it hard to watch and follow. I found it difficult to get the real effect of horror when all I could hear was the sound of the incident rather than actually watching it unfold. Another problem was that the suspense and scare did not start until the final thirty minutes of the movie, making it a slow and uninteresting start. Although the cheap scares at the end did not amount to much, in my opinion, the movie itself would have been a lot better if the end were building up to a great finale rather than an ending of cheap scares. Finally, another weakness was the plot itself. As a viewer, I left the theater still uncertain of what I had watched and what the movie itself was all about.

       Technically, the plot of this movie was about a man looking for his sister when he finds a video on the internet and believes it to be her. However, the movie was a mesh of superstition that did not lead up to anything until the last ten minutes of the film. I am still not sure if this movie will lead to a third installment or perhaps they ran out of funding because in total the movie was only an hour and fifteen minutes and seemed to leave me and the rest of the crowd hanging, and not in a good way. I left the theater confused and not quite sure of what I had seen. Also, the originality was less than par. It was your typical horror film that takes place in a haunted woods. Towards the end they find the haunted house which cues the audience to say “don’t go in to the scary house, you idiot!” and of course the main character goes into the houses and does not come back out. There were also your typical scares of the tree falling, the thunderstorm, and the scary unknown voice. There were even the scary stick figures that hung from the trees and scary locals. One by one each character was picked off and it was even predictable. It was predictable in a sense that it seems to follow the theme of your typical horror film. The movie also seemed to repeat itself and the first movie, The Blair Witch Project. One reviewer even stated, “if I am disappointed in the final result, it’s because the film doesn’t do much more than repeat the previous picture” (Mendelson).  The film itself had a great concept it however, simply failed to execution.

       Blair Witch may have not been the best horror film, but it did displace a few cultural messages, one of them being the popularity in the belief in the supernatural recently. This movie hit on a recent spike in the number of supernatural shows on television and scary movies in theaters. People hope that there is always a reason a person left us and we find it unsettling if we do not know what happened to them. Today, many of the haunted shows are based on living people who believe that their loved ones are trying to reach out. We as humans find it hard to accept that our loved ones may be truly gone, so we create an idea that they might be still with us still somehow. By believing in the supernatural, we may also believe that there are others out there that are trying to communicate with us. James believes that the video he saw on the internet may be a sign from his sister who is trying to communicate with him. Unfortunately, we never find out if it was his sister in the haunted house which in turn left for an awful and unenjoyable cliff hanger.

Mendelson, Scott. "’Blair Witch’ Gets Lost in the Woods." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 13 Sept. 2016. Web. 26 Sept. 2016.

Tallerico, Brian. "Blair Witch Movie Review & Film Summary (2016)." Rev. of Blair Wtich, dir. Adam Wingard. All Content. N.p., 16 Sept. 2016. Web. 25 Sept. 2016.

To watch trailer, click here