The “Blair Witch” reboot was filmed using the code-name “The Woods.” (Photo courtesy of Vertigo Entertainment)

Owen Johnson
Connector Staff

“Blair Witch” is the latest example of a sequel or remake coming out at least a decade after the last movie to make a bunch of money because of its easily marketable name recognition.

Taking place twenty years after “The Blair Witch Project,” the brother of one of the original film students is heading into the woods to look for his sister with the help of three friends and two local residence who found some of the film students’ original footage.

Found footage is a fundamentally flawed genre, and that is very apparent in this movie. There is the completely forced reasoning behind why there is always a camera on. There are insignificant clips that are left in the movie for no reason other than to pad out the run time. There are multiple times when any character with even an iota of logical thought would put down the camera, but instead they keep filming.
This movie is essentially just the original movie done by less competent people. The reason for the found footage is that one of the characters, Lisa (Callie Hernandez) is making a documentary for school about her friend James (James Allen McCune) searching for his sister from the first movie in the woods. You know, because a good friend would definitely use a sensitive topic like a friend looking for their lost sibling in the woods as the basis for a documentary they need to make for class.

Instead of scares coming from the creepy atmosphere and the strange sounds the characters hear in the middle of the night, the movie relies heavily on characters running up on one another without warning for cheap jump scares. Then, the last twenty minutes of the movie is a few of the characters running around the same dilapidated house from the original movie, with several of the same images including the person standing in the corner and one character venturing into the basement. The only difference is that this time, we see the witch, and it looks like a generic scrawny horror movie monster that growls like a wild animal. The only thing that this movie copies from the original without altering is the characters boringly running through the woods in the middle of the night as the camera violently shakes so the audience can’t get a look at the surrounding environment. It turns “The Blair Witch Project” from one of the few genuinely good found footage movies into just another generic horror movie.

To be fair, there are a couple of scenes that rely on the movie’s atmosphere to scare the audience, but those scenes are almost nothing compared to the multiple scenes with a pointless jump scare or characters running through the woods as loud noises that sound like they were added into the movie in post-production explode all around them.
This movie is another pointless remake in a long line of pointless remakes that only manages to accomplish taking a pre-existing movie idea that works, and turn it into a generic movie that is interchangeable with any number of movies from the same genre.