I’m sure everyone remembers The Blair Witch Project, the 1999 independent horror film that officially kicked off the so-called “found footage” genre of filmmaking. Yes, there had been lesser-known movies made prior to this one that featured the appearance of having filmed by the protagonists, documentary-style – giving the audience a unique, “real-time” perspective on events as they unfolded – but The Blair Witch Project brought such techniques to the masses at a time when the horror genre had begun to stagnate. Accompanied by one of the very first-ever viral internet marketing campaigns – one that actually managed to convince many people that what happened in the movie was, in fact, real – The Blair Witch Project’s tale of three filmmakers traipsing through the backwoods of Maryland while looking for the eponymous Blair Witch and the fate that befell them captivated audiences and shattered box office records.

However, The Blair Witch Project, despite its considerable success, is considered a very flawed film by today’s standards; after the initial viewing it pretty much loses all of its tension and, on subsequent viewings, is revealed for what it really is- a slow, plodding affair with a great deal of badly ad-libbed dialogue. In addition, the film has a lousy payoff at the end after not showing the audience anything but shaky camera footage of trees, rocks, and dirt for 81 minutes. It was groundbreaking for its time, especially in the way that it ushered low-budget, guerilla filmmaking onto the scene – it was filmed in the woods with three amateur actors with cameras that the directors had purchased and later returned to the store when they were done – and it’s aforementioned viral marketing had people packed into theaters, making The Blair Witch Project an insane $248.6 million on a mere $60,000 budget.

But, once deprived of its air of mystery, The Blair Witch Project found itself without the legs to sustain a legitimate franchise, despite being considered a cult classic; a 2000 sequel entitled Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (which abandoned the found footage gimmick and much of the plot of the original) underperformed and was critically panned, and the property was seemingly abandoned afterwards…until now, that is.

Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett have teamed up to bring us the direct sequel to the original film with Blair Witch, an effort that returns to the “found footage” genre and follows a new group of kids venturing into the thick forests of Maryland to find out what happened to the previous group of kids who disappeared in The Blair Witch Project. Filmed in secret under the title of The Woods and publically revealed under its true name for the first time at the 2016 San Diego Comic-Con, Blair Witch was meant to be a surprise, but at this point, should you care? Read on.

Well, Blair Witch is a better film than 2000’s Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which at the time was nothing more than a cheap-o cash grab and all-around terrible movie; sadly, however, this new film also comes across as a cash grab, albeit one that relies heavily on nostalgia to attract audiences…and it’s been a while since 1999. But still, it does have some redeeming factors as well, if you’re brave enough to take it on.

James Donahue (James Allen McCune), brother of the original film’s protagonist Heather, is heading into the Maryland woods to search for his missing sister with several colleagues in tow (Callie Hernandez, Brandon Scott and Ashley Bennett). Of course, they go armed not with weapons or proper woodland survival training, but with video cameras, and what transpires will make you feel very much like you’re watching the first movie all over again, although this time in glorious high-definition video (thanks, technology!). Of course, our intrepid team soon encounters all manner of creepy shenanigans and…well, there’s not much more to it than that, honestly. If you’ve seen The Blair Witch Project you pretty much know what’s going to happen here, and if you haven’t, well, there’s really not much more to tell that isn’t laden with spoilers. But overall, I found Blair Witch to be a re-tread, and an occasionally boring one at that, although there are least a few decent scares here and there to break up the monotony. 

And that brings me to my personal issues with the whole found footage genre to begin with: despite its attempts to bring a sense of realism to movies by allowing audiences to see events as they unfolded for the characters – from their perspective – that realism is destroyed by things inherent to all found footage movies. For example, people who are confronted with monsters or killers but who continue to film – while keeping things properly framed – instead of dropping the camera and running like any real person would. Other gripes include endless rolls of film, hard drives and batteries that never run out, always being in the right place at the right time when something happens…it’s really just contrived filmmaking poorly disguised with spontaneity, and it also limits things from a dramatic/storytelling standpoint. There are very few examples of found footage horror movies that I would cite as effective – Gareth Evans' Safe Haven segment from the 2013 horror anthology V/H/S/2 comes to mind – but otherwise, it’s just not used well in my opinion.

So, Blair Witch…it’s okay. Yeah, it’s almost a complete remake of the 1999 original and it’s somewhat boring in parts, but if you’re in the need for a horror fix or are an especially huge fan of The Blair Witch Project (or both), there are worse things than you can do than check this movie out, provided you’ve already seen a better film currently in theaters- Don’t Breathe, which is truly horror done right in my opinion.