‘Blair Witch’: the standalone game-changer that has been run into the ground
There are some movies that are perfectly fine as standalone features that tell their story, roll credits, and leave it at that. Unfortunately, Hollywood isn’t the type of place where so much as a single penny will be left on the table if there’s money to be made, which is why The Blair Witch Project became a franchise.
Thanks to the unstoppable advent of the internet age, the magic that made the original so special can never be replicated ever again. Not only was Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s supernatural chiller one of the first mainstream hits to harness the untapped power of viral marketing, but there were huge swathes of audience members who went into their local cinema thinking they were watching something completely authentic.
That’s an effect no film can achieve these days, creating a mythology around The Blair Witch Project that was every bit as effective as the lore of the titular ghoul. Sadly, all of the wrong lessons were taken, not that it can taint the movie’s legacy as a genuine harbinger of change that ended up becoming one of the most influential and important features of the last quarter of a century.
Viral marketing, found footage, horror flicks that claimed to be inspired by a true story and low-budget terrors being cobbled together on a shoestring to turn the maximum amount of profit-swamped cinema in the aftermath, hoping to carve off even the smallest slice of the pie that made The Blair Witch Project the most profitable enterprise in cinema history after it rocketed to almost $250million at the box office on a production budget of around $40,000.
While there was nothing the creative team could do about Hollywood at large co-opting what had worked so well for their tiny little film, selling off the rights saw Blair Witch fall victim to the studio machine. 15 months later, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was released and tried to replicate the blurred lines between fact and fiction by presenting itself as a re-enactment of genuine events that befell a group of people who became obsessed with the 1999 original. It was nowhere near as smart as it thought it was, didn’t have a shred of imagination to speak of, and was generally just a shite motion picture.
Lightning had failed to strike twice, but Adam Wingard nonetheless thought he could pull the wool over everyone’s eyes by making a Blair Witch sequel in secret. While it was a neat gimmick that he largely managed to pull off, once the surprise factor wore off, the end result was nothing more than a formulaic found footage horror that didn’t stand out as being any different from the hundreds that came before, albeit this one was slapped with recognisable branding.
After an atrocious sequel and an eminently forgettable follow-up – which itself disregarded the events of Book of Shadows – the Blair Witch goose was well and truly cooked, right? Of course not, with Lionsgate and Blumhouse revealing that the dreaded ‘reimagination’ was on the cards, with the companies promising “a new vision for Blair Witch that will reintroduce this horror classic for a new generation.”
Realistically, how is this supposed to work? Found footage is just as played out as Blair Witch, so it’s hard to imagine it being anything other than a by-the-numbers reboot. Unless, of course, the smartphone and social media angle is leaned into, which is too distressing to even think about. Does anyone want to see a game-changing movie that ushered in a brand new era for cinema repurposed as a TikTok terror? Hopefully, the answer is a resounding no.
Co-producer Mike Monello was less than thrilled with the development, as he was happy to share on social media. “Radical idea: You could try putting this project in the hands of the original team that made the first one,” he wrote. “You know, the team that actually has an entire franchise plan to reinvent what a Blair Witch movie could be?”.
That’s missing the point, too, because nobody needed a second Blair Witch, they definitely weren’t begging for a third, and there’s hardly an outpouring of enthusiasm for a fourth. Some films are better off left alone, and yet, for reasons presumably driven entirely by money, this saga must continue.
