Review of Blair Witch (2016) by Paul B — 20 Sep 2016

In 1999, the Blair Witch Project was released. A movie that was original for its' time as it was shot entirely on hand held cameras and spawned what is known as the "found footage movie". The premise was a simple one, featuring a group of teenagers who film are filming a documentary to investigate the legend of the Blair Witch and mysteriously disappear. Some 17 years on and the horror genre has adopted the found footage movie to various horror themes, there's the haunted house theme in the Paranormal Activity series, zombies in the Spanish made horror (and in my opinion still the best use of the found footage trope) REC. This year director Adam Wingard, a man who invigorated the slasher horror franchise with You're Next and turned Downton Abbey's, Dan Stevens into a killing machine in The Guest has to managed to secretly film a sequel to the Blair Witch Project. As a fan of his previous work I was intrigued to see what he could do with what is now a tiring genre.

The premise is almost identical to the original, a new group of teenagers venture into the woods, this time they are going in search for Heather, one of the girls who went missing in the original and are lead by her brother, James.

The idea is the same, however this time the technology has been upgraded to include a drone helicopter and camera's attached to their heads.

In a recent interview on The Cannon podcast, writer Simon Barrett stated that they didn't want to merely repeat what the first one did, however what we get is nothing particularly new either. There is an abundance of jump scares which become laughable after a while, there are only so many times that someone can jump into the frame and turn around quickly before it gets tiresome. In addition to the jump scares we have the customary laud noises which mostly sound like someone dropping a tea tray on the floor numerous times.

Above all the film is pretty laborious and after all is said done, you're left asking yourself, "if this is a found footage movie with multiple cameras, who edited all together?".