Retro Review: Blair Witch (2016)
Blair Witch released in 2016 is a film with mixed results sprung from an effort to revive a dormant franchise that had shocked the world and set the standard for found footage horror movies 17 years prior. Over that time, Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield both found great success with the same technique.
As all great horror movie monsters, the Blair Witch could not stay dead and this effort attempts to drop another group of wannabe filmmakers in the Burkittsville woods once again in order to follow a lead on one of the friend’s missing sister who disappeared in the woods years earlier.
These efforts are decent but never reach for anything beyond repeating the paces of the original updated with modern effects and sensibilities and a larger budget. While it may entertain new audiences, fans of the original will find it lackluster as a follow up.
Returning to its found footage source, a card informs viewers that what follows was found in the woods, much the same as in the original. We are then introduced to the characters: James, whose sister, Heather, went missing in the woods (see The Blair Witch Project); Lisa, his friend who is shooting a video for class documenting the search; Peter, James’ best friend; and Ashley, Peter’s girlfriend. The crew feels like fodder, excluding James. The performances are standard with nothing good or bad, but the characters do come across as fodder for later on. Each serves their roles but don’t seem to have that much of a life outside of it.
The film continues to mimic the formula of the first film down to reviewing the equipment the friends have. This crew is much better prepared than in the original, mostly due to the passage of time and the advancement of technology that is put to excellent use, including a drone.
Once they are off and reach the woods, the film does pick up, adding two strangers to extend the body count, and offers a pointless party scene with crazy jump cuts that doesn’t seem to serve a purpose. The pacing of the film is much quicker from that point out. But offers less explanations than the original had other than to move the body count. The rest is what you would expect with weird noises, people going missing, and explicit deaths. These deaths differentiate the films, the new and old, bringing in something of the unexplainable absurd which serves little more than to illicit surprise.
The cinematography of the film, as well as the special effects do well here. With the budget clearly on screen. Everyone has cameras, allowing for more angles at all times, as well as a drone to give aerial points of view. These changes work well in keeping the pace going as the filmmakers explained that they wanted this to feel like a chase in the woods.
That primal feeling is captured but it comes at the expense of story. With the large cast, the changes in dynamics as characters are offed isn’t explored as much as it could be and the force and events with the Witch just aren’t logical by any reasonable stretch. Returning to the characters as well, they make decisions that aren’t smart, i.e. wandering off on their own. For a film in the twenty-first century, characters need to be smarter than that. And while they make note of all the technology that they have at their disposal, having it placed around their camp at one point could have offered an opportunity for them to learn something about the evil force, but this was missed, which is a shame as it served nearly the entire basis for the better left forgotten flop sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. While the original was based on a looming sense of dread, this replaces those built up moments with jump scares, including even one scene halfway through that was nothing but them scaring each other. With extensive lore from the first film as well as the entirety of that film and parts of it left unexplained, the film never chooses to use it and instead tries to show using its larger budget what the original teased.
Blair Witch is an effort worth taking in revitalizing a franchise that barely launched, but fails by trying to put the original on steroids and failing to jumpstart the heart that made the original work so well. New audiences can enjoy it and will be more likely to now find the original film. Old fans will enjoy it as a more worthy sequel than the previous effort but one that still won’t escape the original’s shadow.
