Don’t Roll Your Eyes Yet — A New ‘Blair Witch Project’ Movie Could Work With These Changes

Horror fans let out a collective groan recently with the announcement from CinemaCon on April 10 that Jason Blum‘s Blumhouse is working with Lionsgate on rebooting The Blair Witch Project. It was the first of what are planned to be multiple projects between the two companies, with the plan to revive several horror classics. While no details about the film’s plot were released, Adam Fogelson, the Lionsgate Motion Picture Group chair, called the reimagining a “new vision for Blair Witch that will reintroduce this horror classic for a new generation.” One of the upcoming film’s producers is Roy Lee, who also produced the follow-up to the original, 2016’s Blair Witch. The news of yet another uninspired remake/reboot/legacy sequel/what have you of a popular horror movie is enough to make you roll your eyes. While another attempt could be a massive failure, there is hope here. If Blumhouse strips down the budget, finds a way to make the plot feel fresh in our current times, and gets an exciting and fresh director at the helm then maybe, just maybe, a Blair Witch Project reboot could work.

The Blair Witch Project

Three film students vanish after traveling into a Maryland forest to film a documentary on the local Blair Witch legend, leaving only their footage behind.

Release Date

July 30, 1999

Director

Daniel Myrick , Eduardo Sánchez

Cast

Heather Donahue , Michael C. Williams , Joshua Leonard

Main Genre

Horror

Writers

Daniel Myrick , Eduardo Sánchez , Heather Donahue

‘The Blair Witch Project’ Is Terrifying Even When You Know It’s Not Real

When The Blair Witch Project came out in 1999, it became a pop culture phenomenon and one of the most profitable films ever made, raking in a staggering $260 million worldwide on a budget of just $60,000. A big chunk of that tally came from the morbid curiosity of theatergoers, who wondered if they were about to watch some sort of snuff film. This was because of the brilliant marketing campaign from Artisan Entertainment, and directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. Before The Blair Witch Project ever hit cinemas, the film was out there in a way that went well beyond simple trailers and cast interviews.

With The Blair Witch Project being a found footage film, in an era when the subgenre was barely known to the average movie fan (Cannibal Holocaust was the most famous found footage film at the time, but not for the right reasons), the plan was to make audiences think it was as real as possible before they’d ever seen a single second. This was accomplished not just through a cast of no-name stars, with Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard not being known actors, but also by the mock Sci-Fi Channel documentary, Curse of the Blair Witch, and a website that treated the plot as if it was a true event, going so far as to include fake interviews and reports from the police. This was the early days of the internet when we were more likely to believe everything we saw on the World Wide Web, and we ate it up.

That curiosity may have gotten people to the theater, but The Blair Witch Project has endured long after it was revealed to be nothing more than a movie. This is because of how raw and real everything felt. It was bare bones, with no jump scares, no loud score telling us how to feel, and not even a shot of the monster. The Blair Witch Project found its fear by getting inside our minds, creating images in our imagination far more frightening than anything someone could create for us.

Recent Found Footage Horror Films Have Used Modern Technology to Its Advantage

Despite The Blair Witch Project‘s colossal success, it took the guts of a decade for the found footage subgenre to really explode. That would come in the wake of the first Paranormal Activity movie in 2007, which became one of the most profitable movies of all time. After that, we were inundated with found footage horror movies. While some entries were interesting, many were just cheap carbon copies, with shaky cameras, screaming actors, and everyone dying off-screen at the end. Even Blair Witch Project tried to recreate the magic, first with 2000’s Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. It flopped hard, earning a mere 14% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and making only $47 million worldwide. It bizarrely ditched the found footage format and took a traditional film approach. 16 years would pass until the sequel, Blair Witch, brought the franchise back to found footage — but it was seen as a dull imitation of the original, with a meager box office haul of $45 million. This wasn’t much of a surprise because, by 2016, the found footage fad was long played out.

Related

This Underrated Found Footage Horror Borrows the Best Parts of ‘Lake Mungo’ and ‘Blair Witch Project’

Just like those two classics, the fear comes from what you don’t see.

Recently, found footage has been making a bit of a comeback through new approaches by its filmmakers. The V/H/S series has been clever by using the anthology film format wrapped in found footage, making a wide variety of stories able to be told in a more immediate fashion. Films like Unfriended, Host, Megan is Missing, Searching, and Horror in the High Deserthave received positive attention by using the format in inventive ways. They didn’t have to be overly complicated; rather, they simply took the familiar and approached it from the realistic lens of the modern technology that controls us today.

For example, Rob Savage‘s Host is about an evil entity unleashed during a seance. Seances are nothing new in horror cinema — but they’ve never been done on a laptop, with the entire runtime taking place over a Zoom call. In Megan is Missing, a child predator abducts two teenage girls, and while that is terrifying enough, having the story being told through one of the girl’s laptop cameras makes it even more unsettling; as if we’re watching these kids be tortured right in front of us. Horror in the High Desert is a lot like The Blair Witch Project, except that the protagonist, Gary (Eric Mencis), gets lost in the Great Basin Desert. Gary’s doomed fate is spurred on by hate comments online from followers who demand he prove the existence of an eery house he accidentally stumbled upon. Even after Gary’s body is found brutally killed, multiple people want to find this creepy house and whoever (whatever) inhabits it to see for themselves and online glory. This is something that a new Blair Witch Project could tap into.

A Bare Bones, Immersive ‘Blair Witch Project’ Could Be as Scary as Ever

One of the problems of 2016’s Blair Witch is that it had a $5 million budget. It might have been found footage, but it felt too choreographed and glossy, including obvious CGI and musical cues. It was an imitation of found footage, instead of feeling like real life. The aforementioned recent examples didn’t have the same issue. 2014’s Unfriended, by comparison, had just a $1 million budget (which is arguably still too much) and it made almost $63 million.

A Blair Witch Project reboot can succeed by staying bare bones in its budget and still using the tricks of our times to make the world feel more real. It’s not how much money that’s spent that matters most, but how the story is told. We live in a world now obsessed with the internet and social media. Imagine a Blair Witch Project that combined the world of today with the fears created 25 years ago. There’s a way to explore this. What if our doomed heroes are not recording themselves in a video to be found later, but putting out what they see through a live stream, or interacting with people on social media in real time? The Blair Witch Project changed horror, but it also had its limitations. We’re told at the beginning that what we’re watching has already happened and the protagonists are gone. We know the ending and there is safety in that. A reboot in the world of 2024, shown from a live perspective, can flip that, making the audience a witness, putting us right there in the woods as well, further immersing us, and making any ending possible. Just this one alteration changes everything, opening up Blair Witch‘s world and our imagination.

A new Blair Witch movie could not only be an opportunity to make a follow-up that does the original justice, it could be a chance for Blumhouse to return to what brought it glory in the first place. Some recent duds notwithstanding, Blumhouse became a respected name in horror through movies filled with interesting ideas and fresh approaches — Insidious, Sinister, The Bay, The Invisible Man, and many more. Indeed, the film that launched its rise was the bare-bones, innovative found-footage exercise Paranormal Activity. Could a new Blair WItch movie light a new fire at Blumhouse while giving us a reboot that pays tribute to what made the original so scary while incorporating all that makes current found footage horror so effective? It’s all possible — we’ll just have to wait to see if it’s a reality. (edited)

The Blair Witch Project is available to watch on Plex in the U.S.

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