Season of the Witch: A Review of Blair Witch (2016)

         

             I finally watched director Adam Wingard’s 2016 revival of the Blair Witch franchise. I use the word “watched” loosely here, however, since I spent most of the movie looking around first a bag of SweeTarts and then, later, my phone. This might sound like high praise at first—that I was apparently so frightened of Blair Witch that I couldn’t even look at it straight on—but the whole experience ended up frustrating me more than anything. I spent most of the film looking at the screen through some sort of filter not because the actual events unfolding onscreen were genuinely frightening, but because at this point, the threat of getting jump-scared has made me second-guess every second of modern horror that I watch. There’s an argument to be made that jump scares should be accepted as a necessary and important feature of the genre; however, I would debate their ultimate usefulness at scaring an audience.

Sure, the fear of getting jumped puts you on edge, and, sure, the actual moment of the jump is frightening on an animal level since almost no one is immune to sudden loud noises, but few of these so-called “scares” have any real staying power. Oftentimes, once the jump has passed, it’s over. The viewer is released; the moment is forgotten. I don’t regard this as true horror. Jump scares have their place in the horror genre, but their overuse has, I think, become more of a deterrent to watching modern horror films. I’m highly biased in this regard, but I’m just really over jump scare-saturated horror. I tend to prefer films that instill a creeping, lingering dread or that focus their horror on specific creepy or frightening images or figures. A terrifying mood sticks with you long into the night. Films like The Babadook, It Follows, The VVitch, and, yes, The Blair Witch Project itself focus on cultivating atmosphere, and they’re all the scarier for it.

Let’s not forget that the original Blair Witch has one of the most iconic frightening images in horror cinema: At the climax of the film, the two surviving characters discover an abandoned house in the woods. They’re drawn inside by the cries of someone or something that sounds like their disappeared friend. The mad search of the house ends with the protagonist Heather racing into the basement and spotting her friend Mike standing silently, dutifully facing the far corner of the room. Heather screams and screams as she (and we) recognize the modus operandi of local legend and murderer Rustin Parr. Someone or something strikes Heather while she is screaming, silencing her and knocking the camera she’s been carrying to the ground. The film ends. Just thinking about that dimly-lit, low quality image of a man standing in a dirty basement corner while his friend screams her head off before being murdered gives me the chills. Why? Because it’s genuinely creepy, well-presented horror that doesn’t rely on any sudden loud noises to spook the audience.

The entire Blair Witch Project is a study in the measured, steady building of dread culminating in the final encounter in the abandoned house. The movie’s low budget meant that the creators had to focus on human drama and fear over flashy effects and action. Another iconic shot from the film (the one that graces the DVD case’s cover) is of a crying girl’s face—Heather, documenting what might be the last moments of her life to the audience through her camera. It’s intensely personal and raw, and it works so well in this seminal work of found footage horror because of the project’s scope and budget, the DIY spirit of the thing. The same sort of shot loses its poignancy in something like the sixth season of American Horror Story (which is itself quite good) because now we’re in the land of bigger budgets and special effects—the land occupied by the new Blair Witch.

Although the 2016 Blair Witch is positioned as a direct sequel to the first film, it feels more like a remake of the original with the budget to do the sort of things that the original might have done if it had the money. At heart, though, the story of Heather’s brother and his search for his missing sister hits all the same story beats as the original movie. There is new stuff in the mix like more body horror, an actual monster (that we see), an excruciatingly claustrophobic tunnel sequence, and some monkeying with… let’s say “time travel” with heavy air quotes. However, all of these new elements are ultimately embellishments on a plot that very closely mirrors that of the original film:

Our (larger) band fools around a bit good-naturedly before getting to the woods, and this opening includes a scene in a hotel where everyone is happy pre-frightmare. Once they’re in the woods, there’s a lot of in-group fighting, and some member(s) betray the trust of the others with regard to the group’s navigation. In the first film, Mike threw the map in the stream. This time, we find out that local volunteers Lane and Talia don’t actually know their way around the depths of the woods… after the entire group is already well and truly lost. The gang tries the sensible thing of walking in a straight line to get out but find themselves doubling back on their own trail instead. The creepy stick people show up. The piles of rocks make an appearance. One of the group members trashes the stick people and is the first to disappear. Eventually, once their numbers have been thinned out, the characters find the abandoned house in the woods, and the movie ends with our protagonist getting struck by someone or something off-screen as the camera falls to the ground and records for a few moments longer before the movie ends. This time, though, the mad dash through the house ends in the attic and not the basement. There’s more to it than that—and maybe I’m simplifying unfairly—but there’s no escaping the fact that at its core Blair Witch hits a lot of the same story beats as the earlier movie.

To give the new film some credit here, there is a suggestion that there could be some supernatural cycle at work that may be intentionally causing events to follow a similar trajectory to the first film. This comes as an actually fun, clever little reveal that happens in an understated way during the climax. The “time travel” I’m referring to very vaguely here in order to avoid unnecessary spoilers is one of the best embellishments new Blair Witch brings to the table. The tunnel scene is another good addition. It made me incredibly uncomfortable, but it was a great example of horror that will likely play on the fears of a large number of its audience members without having to resort to jump scares.

But this is still just The Blair Witch Project done flashier and without the low-budget charm of the original. It feels like they could have (and arguably should have) gotten more creative with the storytelling this time around. The aforementioned American Horror Story: Roanoke uses several different framing devices throughout its season, changing from a Dateline-style drama with the “real people” who experienced the horror narrating a re-enactment of the events performed by “actors” to a found footage horror film shot with cellphones and police body cameras to a collage of different genres (news reports, an episode of a fake paranormal investigation show, and so on) while also toying with occasional meta-commentary on itself. It does pull the Blair Witch Project card of telling the audience that such and such footage was assembled from such and such place after so and so disappeared without a trace, but that’s just one aspect of the show. It knows that just trying to sell the audience on the supposed verisimilitude of the found footage subgenre isn’t enough anymore—that the whole approach to horror filmmaking has gone stale—so it broadens the scope. Yes, this is fiction, but see how many layers of “fiction” and “fiction-pretending-to-not-be-fiction” that we can layer together using all these different lenses? The audience knows that none of this is actually real, so they have fun with it. Blair Witch 2016 still feels like it’s still trying to be Blair Witch Classic—like this is still a time when people will watch the film and be uncertain enough about whether these people are actually still alive or not to lend the whole viewing experience some extra level of dread. It needed something more to differentiate it from all the pretenders to the throne that have come out since the original film and that have, over time, caused the appearance of yet another limited point of view in a horror film filtered through yet another shaky handheld camera to be met with groans instead of excitement. There are more points of view (more babes lost in the woods equals more cameras) to use this time to construct more elaborate shots, but something more inventive like the drone camera that is very much under-utilized in the film is still missing.

The one area where this new Blair Witch matches OG Blair Witch that doesn’t feel like a shortcoming this day in age is with regard to the rawness of its performances. As viewers, we’re used to screams of supposed agony, used to seeing people supposedly fly into violent rages and lose their minds and experience all these extreme heights of emotion that we (hopefully) don’t experience ourselves. We know the screams are fake, but we buy into the emotion of the moment anyway because the approximation of what those real emotions might look like is close enough for us to pretend while we watch. Of course, one of the most well-known factoids concerning the production of The Blair Witch Project is how far everyone went to try to achieve something more real-seeming with the film: actors literally camping in the woods while being spoon-fed direction and tormented by the rest of the crew at night. I presume this wasn’t the case with Blair Witch given that this is a “proper” Hollywood film now, but the performances of distress in this movie are still very powerful. The noises that our protagonist makes at the climax of the film, as she films herself walking backwards to avoid accidentally seeing the titular Blair Witch are the sort of labored, disturbing, awful sounds you would hope to never hear coming out of a human mouth. Earlier, when the character Talia is losing her mind and jumping at shadows, she really does seem to have snapped thanks to the emotional intensity of the performance.

That rawness that I mentioned before with regard to Heather’s speech directly into the camera in the first Blair Witch is perfectly recaptured here at the film’s most emotionally-fraught moments. You feel like you’re actually watching someone come apart at the seams, which isn’t something I feel about a lot of horror films. One of the best examples of this, for me, has been and remains Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The sheer amount of screaming that Sally (Marilyn Burns) does later in the film and especially during the dinner scene where the cannibal family alternatively hurls abuse and screams back at her makes one worry for her sanity. At the very end, when she’s safe in the back of the pickup truck and racing away from Leatherface, her screaming transitions quite naturally into laughter, and it’s not relief that we feel hearing her laugh—it’s dread. It’s like watching someone’s mind finally break under the strain of what they’ve endured. The new Blair Witch captures this same feeling, and I only wish that the horror responsible for the breakdowns was more inventive and more consistently, genuinely scary. It was probably unreasonable to expect a classic in the found footage horror sub-genre to return after all this time and show everyone how it’s done once more, but it’s hard to resist the poetic allure of such a narrative. Unfortunately, that isn’t what happened here. Blair Witch is serviceable—It’ll jump-scare you a bit, if nothing else—but it can’t escape the inertia of years upon years of similar films or the gravitational pull of its far groundbreaking predecessor’s achievements.