By Brett Blake How a person will feel about BLAIR WITCH will likely be influenced in some way by how they feel about THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Briefly, my relationship with that film: as a 12-year-old who saw it in the summer of 1999, I was deeply underwhelmed by it. I had followed the hyperbolic reactions and reviews, which got me hyped up for “The Scariest Movie Of All Time.” Instead, the film just didn’t click for me. However, over time, my opinion of it has grown almost exponentially; as I’ve gotten more in touch with the things that frighten me on a personal level, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT has proven to have intense staying power. The notion of getting lost in an extremely remote forest and then being viciously tormented by unseen and cruel, malevolent forces (whether of the supernatural or - perhaps an even more unsettling prospect - human variety) is something which the now-29-year-old version of me finds truly scary. There are moments in that film - the giggling of children in the middle of the night... the distant screams of one of the lost filmmakers cutting through the forest as he’s being tortured off somewhere in the dark - that are as chilling (for me) as any moments in all of horror cinema. But you can’t just repeat that. You can’t just reuse the same tricks, the same gags, just as they were done in 1999. To do a sequel 17 years later which just rehashes the first movie would be a ridiculous and insulting proposition. Luckily, the filmmaking team behind BLAIR WITCH clearly understood that when they set out to make this movie. Yes, on a certain fundamental level, this new film does use the same formula of “young people terrorized in the woods,” but it tries to spin that out into new angles that both give this story its own flavor and also pay respects to the strengths of the first movie. Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett (the duo behind YOU'RE NEXT and THE GUEST, two very good movies) are mostly successful at that, even if at the end of the day, BLAIR WITCH does ultimately feel like a louder and more extreme version of the same basic story with a few added wrinkles. The premise - which revolves around James (James Allen McCune), the younger brother of Heather, one of the missing students from the original film, assembling a group of friends to look for her after a mysterious video (which appears to show her alive) is discovered - is basically just an excuse to get us back into the woods, but that’s okay. What ensues is akin to a horror romp through the forest, complete with some wonderful scares and spooky setpieces, but also lacking that extra layer of genuine unease and disquieting fear that propelled THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. One of the biggest ways in which this new BLAIR WITCH differentiates itself from the original is on a technical level; the quality of the “found footage” is at a much higher, HD level this time around (in contrast to the grainy, ultra-low-budget feel of the first, which was shot on a combination of 16mm and video). Additionally, there are so many camera angles this time, so much coverage of the action, that when you cut between different perspectives, it feels more like an actual movie than the singular point-of-view aesthetic you most often get with found footage. We certainly get the POV stuff, but the copious angles give the film a very cinematic feel at points, which is a refreshing at a time where the found footage technique has started to be run into the ground. Unquestionably, the strongest element of the movie is its sound design, which is absolutely spectacular. Quite literally, this movie should be up for Oscars when that time rolls around, because the design and the mix are outstanding. There is great texture and ambience, as well as some quite haunting stuff buried in the mix. I’d go so far as to say the movie is worth seeing just for the sound alone, as it’s easily the most effective and eerie part of the film. A great sound mix is often key to establishing tone, and that’s very much the case here. I can't praise this sound design enough. Where the movie stumbles - and not insignificantly - is in the way it removes almost all of the ambiguity that is present in the first film and its surrounding ancillary mythology. No longer is there any question about what happened to the three kids who got lost in the woods. No longer can there be multiple possible theories regarding their fate. BLAIR WITCH makes it pretty clear what sort of forces were at work back then, and are still at work today. For some people, this will be a wonderful thing, but for others (myself among them), this nullifies and counteracts one of the elements of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT that made it so effective: the fear of the unknown. In my opinion, this movie goes just slightly too far, shows us just slightly too much, before culminating in an ill-conceived ending that most will probably find deeply unsatisfying. This is not as good a film as THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, and it is not as scary as THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. That movie truly creates a mood of abject, hopeless terror that feels completely authentic, and it feels like something that could have really happened. This new BLAIR WITCH is fairly content to be a more conventional roller coaster ride, a ramped-up and heightened version of the basic premise. It is quite effective at what it sets out to do, and there are several moments that are unnerving, but it’s a film designed to jolt and shock the audience rather than truly frighten or unsettle them. To put it another way, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT made it easy to suspend disbelief and buy into the notion that it might have been real, but with BLAIR WITCH, we always know we’re just watching a (mostly) conventional horror movie. It’s a fun ride, and a lot of the jump scares got me, but it’s not a movie that’s going to stay with me (or follow me home, so to speak) in the same upsetting way that its predecessor did.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
January 2023
Categories
All
|