Note: I wasn’t planning on watching the three Blair Witch movies until my five-year-old son marked on his face with a pen, and I noticed that it looked like one of the stick figures from the series. When I saw that all three of them were easily available to me, it was on.
Over the past few years, I’ve made a point to get more into horror franchises. Until relatively recently, I had not seen most of the films of all the major series: Friday the 13th, Nightmare, Halloween, etc. Now that I've covered most of the popular franchises, I’m branching (pun intended) out. After revisiting the first Blair Witch Project, I finally watched the two sequels.
There’s no point getting into the phenomenon of The Blair Witch Project. Anyone who’s seen the movie is probably aware of the original marketing campaign and all that. Instead, I wanted to get into how such an insanely successful film didn’t spawn a once-a-year horror franchise a la Saw and Paranormal Activity.
The first film is still polarizing, with many dismissing it as an unscary, boring gimmick. But it worked on me back in 1999, and it still works today. Found footage in the woods will always creep me out, and the low-fi filming coupled with the mythology of both the titular witch and the film itself made for an unnerving experience. And that ending is among one of my favorite horror endings of all time. I’m not alone, and the movie is still one of the most successful films of all time. So of course there would be a sequel.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 had the opposite buzz of the original. Its reputation was bad enough that I just skipped it and only watched it for the first time a couple days ago. I knew they at least didn’t do found footage again, but the general consensus was that it was awful and should not have been made. Watching now without the burden of expectations, I still didn’t care for it.
Book of Shadows starts off promising enough, setting up a meta scenario in which the town from the first film is now being inundated with annoying fans of the original film. And while the first film is what brings the main characters to the woods, the initial interesting premise is ditched for some amnesia/possession mindfuck lameness that primarily takes place in an abandoned factory converted into an apartment. It very much felt like a standalone movie that was shoehorned into the attempted Blair Witch franchise, and based on a little Wikipedia search, that was the case.
I don’t like just generally shitting on a movie, though, and the first few minutes did have me hopeful. I suppose I would rather have had a movie that was more about the townspeople, and a new group of tourists could be attacked in a similar fashion to the first film, but it’s revealed to be locals trying to scare them away. Then things get out of hand, and there are some murders, etc. This probably wouldn’t have had much success, either, but I feel like that would be more in keeping with the series
The tepid response to Book of Shadows seemed to kill any hopes of a franchise until 2016 with the release of Blair Witch. I skipped out on this one to the point that I forgot it existed. Blair Witch was an attempt to get back to the original film, to a fault.
Blair Witch is about Heather’s little brother, grown up now, searching for her in the woods after seeing a YouTube video that appears to show her. It’s all found footage, again under the guise of making a documentary, and pretty much all the same stuff happens, but this time the cameras are better, and they have a drone. There’s also more witch stuff, and by that I mean they show the witch (a spindly monster reminiscent of the thing in REC). It’s all fine, I guess, but pretty pointless.
Based on a few Letterboxd reviews I’ve seen, however, it straight up pissed people off with more than a few reviews reduced to simply, “Fuck off.” I get that response, as this is essentially a remake that brings nothing new to the table. And the updated technology is gimmicky (the drone is fucking worthless and features more than one annoying scene of a slow drone takeoff with the characters standing there watching). My biggest issue with the updated cameras is this need for modern horror movies to distort the video whenever something creepy happens. What’s the point of having high definition if you’re just going to distort anything worth seeing? Anyway, it was more of a forgettable than enraging experience for me, but it did make it clear that this property is not meant to be a franchise.
Blair Witch was an attempt to fix the assumed mistake of Book of Shadows by going back to found footage, but it’s clear that fans didn’t want this anymore than they wanted Book of Shadows. The only use of the two sequels to the original has been to prove there is no formula to follow for a Blair Witch movie. That first film was a combination of once in a lifetime marketing opportunity thanks to the early days of the internet, and popularizing the found footage gimmick. Unlike a series like Paranormal Activity, you couldn’t just keep throwing victims to the witch. With that found footage series, you could always change up the family or the ghost or whatever. But Blair Witch is too tied to the mythology, and there’s really nowhere to go with it. We don’t want to just see a new group of people get killed by the witch over and over again. And we don’t want to see more of the witch, either.
It may seem obvious to say Blair Witch should have ended with the first film, especially since there are a few horror franchises that would’ve been fine being one and done (Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre come to mind). But there’s fun to be had with even the silliest horror franchise (give me Leprechaun and Jason in space, and I’ll have some dumb fun; hell, find a way to send Chucky, Leatherface, and Michael Myers up there, too). There’s no fun to be had with Blair Witch. It was a unique experience for its time, and it should have stayed that way. But the cat’s out of the bag already, so I guess we’ll see if they come up with something interesting when the inevitable reboot/reimagining/legacy sequel comes out in the next few years.