Shady business was afoot in the cinema lobby. It was a Friday in July at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, and, with the audience seated inside, staff appeared from the lobby shadows, taking down posters for the premiere now screening: The Woods, from director Adam Wingard, previously responsible for the meta genre-benders You’re Next and The Guest. As the film began, opening text mentioned a DV tape found in the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland. This sounded familiar. In the lobby, the posters for The Woods were replaced with ones revealing the film’s true title: Blair Witch. The new film from one of the freshest voices in the genre was, in fact, a sequel to someone else’s.
This was all Lionsgate’s idea. In 2003, it had bought Artisan, the distributor of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, thus inheriting the rights to all things Blair. Jason Constantine, Lionsgate’s president of acquisitions, had been thrilled by the original, which notoriously blended fiction with reality, following twentysomething documentarians Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard and Mike Williams – the actors’ real names – as they explored the mythology concerning a witch and a child killer in the Maryland woods. Now that he owned the rights, Constantine wanted more. After buying Wingard’s You’re Next in 2011, he was confident the director could reinvent the Blair Witch business for a new generation.
Constantine’s idea was to have Donahue’s brother come looking for her, with some friends armed with an array of contemporary filming equipment. Wingard and writer Simon Barrett, both big fans of the original, immediately said yes to the sequel. They also bought into Constantine’s idea that the marketing should be a ruse: this would prevent any backlash about what they were doing. There had already been one sequel, Joe Berlinger’s Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, a poorly conceived film about possession, featuring characters who were fans of the original film. It was rushed out in 2000 by Artisan, which was keen to capitalise on the success of the first film. “It felt like we had a lot against us,” says Wingard.
He insists emphatically that this is a sequel, not a remake. Constantine has called it a reboot. Whatever the semantics, it has its cake and eats it, doing new things for new audiences while very much treading old ground. Pound for pound, it has more scares than the first, and it’s relentlessly frightening – as a horror exercise, it’s palpably effective, if not half as troubling or haunting. Fans of the original might want to leave the original be, to keep it enshrined as a glorious one-off. In the film industry, though, such a notion is laughable. Wingard has done fine work within the remit he was given, but it’s ironic that The Blair Witch Project, filmed on the fly and off the cuff for $22,000 (£16,500), is now a potentially huge franchise – product – to be pumped.
When it was released in July 1999, a few weeks after Star Wars: Episode I – the Phantom Menace, it felt like a refreshing antidote to the blockbusters it was battling. Directors Dan Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez had come up with the idea in film school, inspired by the paranormal TV documentaries they loved; they wanted to make their own fake version, which would include 20 minutes of supposedly found footage from the woods. Thanks to friends and credit cards, they scraped together the cash, found three amateur actors with improv skills, gave them a crash course in film-making, then dropped them in the Maryland woods for eight days.
Only when they began editing did they realise they had an entire film out there in the woods. They never expected a cinema release – the film was made to be watched late at night on small televisions, perhaps discovered on VHS and handed around by friends. At Sundance, however, Artisan bought it for $1m. The film then made $248m at the box office. “[It] kind of ruined it that it got so damn big,” Sanchez said on Reddit a few years ago, responding to questions about the backlash to the immense hype surrounding the release.
It became a franchise immediately. Myrick and Sanchez wanted to wait a while before making a black-and-white prequel set in the 1700s, delving into the Blair Witch mythology, but Artisan went ahead with its own plans. All goodwill died there and then, the original film sullied by a misguided cash-in. Eventually, though, the found footage genre took off, and the past few years have brought us Cloverfield, Chronicle and the Paranormal Activity series, among hundreds of others.
Trends come and go and come again, says Wingard, who argues that it doesn’t really matter: the films just have to be good. The original Blair Witch – and, to an extent, Wingard’s film – works not because of video cameras, but because of the psychological terror, the fundamental fear of the unknown. Generally, though, sequels bring diminishing returns, but these days they keep on coming. “We’re not going to grind this horror franchise into the ground,” said Paranormal Activity producer Jason Blum while promoting the sixth film last year. Friday the 13th began as a film in 1980 before birthing nine sequels, a Freddy Krueger team-up and a 2009 reboot. By then, the thrill had gone. Nonetheless, another Friday the 13th reboot is on the cards: Breck Eisner, who directed a remake of George A Romero’s 1973 horror The Crazies in 2010, is currently attached. It’s all very disheartening.
“The reason the Freddy and Jason films lose their mystique,” says Wingard, “is those characters get more and more of a personality every film; they become less of this unknown evil presence, which is what is really scary in a horror film.” He has more Blair Witch ideas and is adamant the mythology can be further mined to good effect – as long as it doesn’t lose sight of what made it powerful in the first place.
Regardless, there’s no evading sequel culture. The third US instalment of the Ring saga is due for release next month, and we’ve recently endured a poor TV adaptation of Rosemary’s Baby, a pointless Poltergeist rehash, an atrocious remake of The Omen, an unloved TV series based on the same story and a limp remake of Carrie.
It’s no wonder, then, that the very word “franchise” can cause hearts to sink: more often than not, it’s a byword for exploitation, of product and audience. Wingard’s film is made with love and respect, but its mere existence means it may give us more than we want. The film revels in building on things from the original that were great because they were so fleeting, so vague and ambiguous. For purists, that’s a shame. “We do show you more than what you see in The Blair Witch Project, which literally shows you absolutely nothing,” says Wingard. “But as much as we wanted to show you, we’re throwing 10 more questions at you to ask about what you just saw.”
Perhaps. Horror sequels are inevitable, and we can only hope that they are made well. Keith Calder, a producer of Wingard’s Blair Witch, recently took to Twitter to broach the topic. He has been producing original movies for a decade, he said, most of which were well received – but the attention the Blair Witch film will get is “vastly higher than any of them”. “It feels like riding a sled downhill instead of pushing a boulder uphill,” he said, adding that, while he will still make original films, he also wants “to do more movies based on big IP [intellectual property]”.
You can’t begrudge him that. The business is tough and unforgiving. Calder was a producer on Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa, a film beloved by critics and the handful of people who saw it, but which cost $8m and grossed $3.7m. New versions of older successes are – in theory, at least – safe bets. “For Hollywood, it’s more money ready to be made,” said Eduardo Sanchez last month of Wingard’s sequel. “They’re not going to ignore that for long.” He’s glad, though, that the film is been made by someone who cares, and both he and Myrick are supporting it enthusiastically. They are both still directing, and the attention will help.
In 2008, when Myrick was asked about a potential return to the series, he was in two minds. He spoke again about their period prequel idea, but he added that The Blair Witch Project “was lightning in a bottle”, and that an attempt to repeat it would be fruitless. Try telling that to a film distributor.
Blair Witch opens in the UK on 15 September
