"Blair Witch" respects, rather than subverts, the original

While watching "Blair Witch" (2016, USA), directed by Adam Wingard and written by Simon Barrett (the two are frequent collaborators), one can't help asking if it's a sequel or a remake. Or if it's going to put a new, "post-modern" twist on a horror sub-genre which was already deemed as new and post-modern when the original film first graced the screens about seventeen years ago. Or if the film was even necessary at all, given how the "found-footage" conceit has been followed, imitated, rehashed or even mangled by various directors since "The Blair Witch Project" (a prominent example is the "Paranormal Activity" franchise). But considering how Wingard and Barrett have managed to make the 80s-horror tropes exciting, intriguing and surprising in "You're Next" (home invasion-cum-slasher) and "The Guest" (the mysterious stranger), coming up with another "Blair Witch" might not really be a bad - or disastrous - idea. 

The film jumps off from the climactic cabin sequence in the 1999 original (which, it turns out, was being viewed on YouTube), which becomes the reason and motivation for a college student (James Allen McCune) to put a closure once and for all to a long-standing family tragedy (we learn that he's the brother of Heather, the hapless never-found victim in the first film). So Wingard's film is basically a search for a missing person and, in that sense, a sequel. Or the "legitimate" sequel - if we're going to put out of the scene the much-maligned and jumping-into-the-craze "The Blair Witch Project 2: The Book of Shadows". It might as well follow that "Blair Witch" is "necessary", as, for all that we care, we might want to find out what exactly happened to Heather or if she's still indeed alive all these years, granting that Wingard and Barrett will actually put whatever doubts we have on the matter at rest. Or will they? 

Thus, as to the question of whether or not "Blair Witch" puts a fresh, "post-modern" spin on Eduardo Sanchez' and Daniel Myrick's already-groundbreaking film or on the entire found-footage sub-genre itself, as we've come to expect from Wingard after we've seen his previous works, we might in fact think otherwise. Setting aside the matter that the students here have far better cameras than their predecessors (hi-def recorders, personal cameras, cctv, drones and all that), so much so that the images look crisp and clean (which somewhat negates the home-video nature of the genre), and that a bunch of kids has to once again forego common sense to delve into the sinister woods, which can be forgiven as there's a personal matter at stake here this time around, "Blair Witch" is essentially a duplicate of "The Blair Witch Project". Had the search-for-a-missing-person thread been cut off, this might just as well turn out to be a remake. This might not really be far from Wingard's mind, as he is immensely playing on the audience's familiarity with the tropes of the found-footage genre to make his film work. Not so much to subvert, but to concede to their expectations. 

The good thing is, it's still effective. Building up on mood, atmosphere and sound design (which should really be the true stars in movies of this ilk), the 33-year-old director is able to generate plenty enough jump scares and creepy occurrences which hinge upon man's basic apprehensions over an unseen malevolent presence and fascination with age-old folklores. Though that's just about it, effective utilization of scares and creeps, which gains full force in the once again climactic cabin sequence (isn't this a déjà vu;the final shot is even reminiscent of the one in the Spanish POV, hand-held horror "[Rec]"), backing up our suspicion that "Blair Witch", after all, is a "remake". There's nothing to surprise us in the film really, in a groundbreaking or subversive kind of way. That's simply not in the director's and the screenwriter's agenda. The film was set up as more of a respectful reverence to Sanchez' and Myrick's creation. Even the injection of a couple of plot elements which could have been a "departure" from the original - how the characters seem to be perpetually stuck in night-time (a time-warp element) and how one character appears to have a creature literally living under her skin (a body-horror element) - serves to merely function as a preface, without the materials' potential conflicts being fully brought to the fore. It's half-baked, so to speak (but who knows if this could be a set up for another project in the future). 

In hindsight, rather than expecting "Blair Witch" to be a modern take on a by-now established horror sub-genre, we could instead take it as the director's reverential way of reminding us - particularly today's generation of moviegoers, all growing up on various forms of social media (as suggested by the YouTube clip at the film's start) - that there was once a practically low-budget, small independent movie that introduced us to a totally new way of viewing horror films and thus invented a new form as we've come to know it through the years. "Blair Witch" is not a game-changer per se, but an iteration of the game-changer that was "The Blair Witch Project". 

(A new bunch of college students is back in the woods in Adam Wingard's "Blair Witch")