Maybe a 4 is a high rating, but I just loved this movie.
For a film over a decade in the making, suffering mishandled marketing, and released at a particularly bad time of the year (and after a downright fabulous horror film in Don't Breathe), Blair Witch could have been a LOT worse. It's both a sequel and a re-imagining of the original 1999 masterpiece of the found-footage genre, in much the same way that Friday the 13th (2009) was both a sequel to the original 1980 film, a remake of its 1981 sequel, and a reinvention of the franchise. Speaking of which, I certainly do hope this poorly-titled Blair Witch foray ushers in a franchise.
Before you freak out, consider the original film and the mess of expanded-universe crap that came from it: mockumentaries, video games, comic books, young adult novels, a sequel we all pretend never happened. And that's not to mention that the filmmakers themselves envisioned a series of films, all about the mythology they had fashioned, each of which engaging different aspects of the horrors in the woods. Not unlike American Horror Story, the franchise suggests several other chapters of horror, from Elly Kedward to Rustin Parr, from Coffin Rock to the child-snatcher in the river. With this 2016 re-introduction to the franchise, and its lovely higher production values, perhaps we can expect some more chills and thrills from Burkittsville. I mean, it's about kids in the woods losing their damn minds, and it's all right there on camera. Who doesn't want more of that?
In a lot of ways, I love this film because it brought me back to my love of the original, and because it (hopefully not vainly) promises more to come.
Let's focus on this film now. Blair Witch is imagined, constructed, and fashioned just like the original. Some people may find that repetitive, I find it entrancing. Its noticeably higher budget allows all kinds of flair and fun, and increased attention to the horrors of the woods at night. Now we don't just hear snaps and cracks echoing through the dark, we actually see the trees falling, the tents flying through the air, and an emaciated figure hunting our heroes. You may argue that it's all silly and doesn't do justice to the original; I wonder, though, if this film played it safe and presented us with little more than a psychological thriller, would you have written it off as a cheap duplicate? Of course it has to up the ante and shoot more shit at us. Consider The Conjuring 2 and its almost ludicrous exaggeration of style: It works because we need more.
And before you say, "well now it shows us too much, and there's not enough left to imagine," I assure you there are plenty of lengthy chases through the brush wherein we have no idea what's happening. There are plenty of sounds we hear that we can't explain; one in particular sounds not unlike the demon in Paranormal Activity, or the aliens in X-Files, like a walrus in a tank. Does it make sense in context? Not really. Is it creepy as hell in the moment? You betcha. The film also, kind of like Lost, plays with our awareness of time and mystery. Where the original seems to make linear sense as we watch, it's only afterward that we realize we don't know the full chronology of what happened. This film actively confuses us, and the characters themselves describe what seems to be a time loop: a single night seems to be five days with no sunlight, a found video at the beginning seems remarkably like one at the end, and our hero seems convinced that his sister, who disappeared all those years ago, is still alive in the woods. Ultimately, as you might imagine, there is no explanation of and no reprieve from the weirdness, which is maybe even more terrifying, but does feel a tad gimmicky.
The film works best when it points us back to the original. The long, final shot of the car is a clear indication of that. The first appearance of the stick totems is chilling, the second is terrifying. When our team crosses the river, when trees start snapping and falling, when we see the house again, we are reminded of our own experience with those images from 16 years ago. The film is meta in an odd way, not least because our characters know exactly what they're getting into, and they do it anyway. They fall into the same traps the original trio enacted, and they seem to expect a different outcome. The more flashlights they brandish, the faster the batteries die. Somehow their updated technology -- including, ingeniously on the filmmakers' part, a camera-equipped drone -- makes them more vulnerable or at least more blind to the raw power of nature and night.
If I could change one thing about it, however, I would have pulled an Insidious: Chapter 2 in the final act. Remember how that installment meshed up with its predecessor, and in multiple scenes it felt like we were watching the same movie again, just from a different perspective? That's kind of what I was hoping for here. With the obvious time-loop thing going on, I was sort of hoping that the disembodied screams and cries in the woods would be revealed to belong to Heather and her team from the original, and that in the last scene, we'd see that it was maybe our new heroes who ran into Heather in the house, knocking the camera from her hands. Better still, that Heather or her brother would end up killing the other, having gone mad in their arboreal hell. The movie as it is stands well enough on its own, I just would have liked a bit more trippy, cerebral material in the script, like in the original.
This film, lacking in psychology, somehow makes up by being even crazier and more violent. There's a visceral immediacy in the horrors here. We don't just see the trees falling; one falls on us. We don't just see the wound in Ashley's leg, we see it oozing until she pulls out something monstrous and indescribable. We are stuck in the tunnel with Lisa (in easily the best scene of the film) as she claws through the mud and roots. Actually, there is one other thing I would have changed about this movie: We see a couple times a figure in the woods, apparently naked, emaciated and with unnaturally long limbs. We are led to believe that this figure is the witch herself, though that point remains up for debate (along with just about everything else "supernatural" that happens). I wouldn't have shown that figure, simply because the whole point of horror for me in this franchise is that the "monstrous" is not embodied. There is no specific evil thing out to get us (which, logically, we can then outrun, outsmart, or overpower), but rather a general malice of place and intent, where the real physical threat comes from ourselves.
But that's just me.
As you can tell, I have a lot of feelings about this movie. It's not a great film, and really can't hold much of a candle to the original. But it's a lot of fun, has its moments of terror, and it can really get a geek to, well, geek out (obviously). I'm hoping it ushers in at least another film or two, just so we can flesh out a bit more of the mythology at work here. And, of course, so we can go back into the woods again.
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