Two months ago, at the San Diego Comic Con convention – annual celebration of all things nerdular – attendees gathered for a screening of The Woods, a new film by Adam Wingard. There was some excitement.
Director of excellent, inexpensive horrors such as You're Next and The Guest, Wingard is something of a hero to open-minded blood hounds. The excitement turned to ferment as the audience realised they were watching a much-delayed follow-up to The Blair Witch Project.
“It was easier to keep it a secret than you’d think,” Wingard tells me. “The aspect of not talking about it was annoying. We just had to keep our mouths shut. But it’s a funny thing. Right at the start, Blood Disgusting figured it out and published an article saying we were secretly making a Blair Witch film. The story just went away. It was the worst-kept secret ever. There’s so much information out there that people have stopped believing.”
So, people read the story and felt: well, this is just the sort of barmy theory you expect to read these days?
“Exactly. There’s just too much information.”
The distributors seemed to have learnt a trick from the music industry here. Whereas movies are now trailed by years of chatter, records by artists such as Beyoncé and David Bowie now “drop” with little pre-publicity.
Unsettling
"We are living in an age of unnecessary sequels and people are pretty sick of it," he says. "It was about protecting the release. If we'd signed on two years ago and said 'we're doing a Blair Witch sequel', people would be griping about Hollywood being out of ideas. We are the most indie guys on the planet. We couldn't be less Hollywood. You change the conversation. Rather than it being 'oh, they're making a Blair Witch sequel', it's 'oh, The Woods trailer was a Blair Witch sequel all along'."
Now 33, born and raised in Tennessee, Wingard is exactly the sort of fellow who should have been entrusted with a Blair Witch sequel from the start. He was just 16 when the original film came out and it helped confirm his developing vocation as a purveyor of economically budgeted shocks. Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, The Blair Witch Project was the first film to generate industrial levels of buzz on this new internet thing. The notion of the "found footage" film – apparently constructed from images filmed by the characters – was new to most mainstream viewers (yes, we know about Cannibal Holocaust). People enjoyed wondering if this might be actual footage of actual horrors.
“I watched it six times when it came out on VHS,” Adam remembers. “And I wasn’t one of those who thought it was real.”
Sadly, Hollywood didn't get it. When the time came to make a sequel, the studio commissioned an incoherent, largely conventional horror entitled Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.
Gone was the shaky, low-grade video that made the original so unsettling. The film appeared on many “worst of” polls for 2000 and the franchise – in terms of theatrical features, anyway – was dead almost before it had begun. “I remember being so disappointed. There was no sense of what made the first film so special. It so spoiled the experience that I even wrote the first film off in my mind. I remember talking to Daniel and Eduardo about it at Sundance. ‘When were they going to make a reboot?’ And then, two weeks later, Lionsgate told me they had the rights. I watched it again and was blown away by how classy it was.”
Think back to 1999. When The Blair Witch Project emerged, the film press was alive with tales of how this was going to change Hollywood. There were even suggestions that the old guard were shaking in their boots.
Within a few years, such guerrilla projects – The Blair Witch Project was made for $60,000 – would have elbowed the big-budget beasts into the gutter. That never quite happened. Both threat and promise were unfulfilled.
"I'm not sure that's true. Just because it didn't happen immediately doesn't mean nothing changed," Wingard says. "You look at Paranormal Activity. That looks like the real successor to Blair Witch. It took a couple of years for the 'found footage' thing to set in."
Economies of scale
Well, yes. But the industry still managed to avoid any serious incursions from the bargain-basement impresarios. The economies of scale remain in place. Still, Lionsgate have been sensible enough to hire Wingard to resurrect the Blair Witch.
Once again he sends a party of intrepid (foolish?) young people into the woods. “We have the characters all wear cameras on their ears this time,” he explains. “So there’s no reason for them to stop filming. We ingrain you in the reality for the first half, and then stick the characters right in your heads when they’re being tormented.” That sounds very much in the tradition.
