I still remember The Blair Witch Project, watching it when I was a teenager in the world of Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and all of the rebirth of horror movies at the time - but it was The Blair Witch Project that had a profound effect on me. It is the movie that started viral marketing, and it worked incredibly well - just not so much for its sequel.
Well, the Blair Witch is coming back with a sequel to the original, and not the mess that was Book of Shadows. Lionsgate commited to the new Blair Witch early, marketing the movie as 'The Woods' so that people wouldn't know it was Blair Witch, and whether they would see if it was after watching the movie. Once the screenings began, it was hard to keep that secret.
Blair Witch uses "advances in camera technology and selfie culture, there are many more cameras involved than the three angles Heather, Josh and Mike offered. There's plenty of coverage, and more fun to be had with body cameras", reports Slashfilm.
Blair Witch returns to Burkittsville and the same woods we saw in the original movie, where three film students were making a documentary. In Blair Witch, we have James Donahue, who is the brother of Heather Donahue who disappeared in The Blair Witch Project after she stupidly chased her friend through the woods and downstairs into that house in the sh*t-yourself final few moments of the movie.
There are new tapes that emerge from Burkittsville, MD that leads James back to the woods looking for answers on his sister's disappearance 20 years earlier. In the new Blair Witch, there's just one film stuent - James' girlfriend Lisa who is filming a project for her own documentary class, but she's just helping her boyfriend to find closure in Heather's disappearnace. Their friends, Peter and Ashley join them - and will surely die in the movie (that's just my thoughts).
In Slashfilm's review of the movie, they tease: "Blair Witch is a love letter to the film that began the found footage horror craze. Even though it would take Paranormal Activity and proliferation of consumer cameras to cause a glut of found footage horror movies, The Blair Witch Project is the one that started it all. Blair Witch honors its tradition and uses all the tricks filmmakers have learned in the past 17 years to make us scared of the woods again".
Blair Witch will scare in cinemas on September 16, and I'll be there on day one for sure.