★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
To be completely honest, I’ve developed a little bit of a crush
on director Adam Wingard. I’d never even heard of him until 2013, when I
went to see You’re Next completely
on a whim, and had an absolute whale of a time watching Sharni Vinson stick a
blender in someone’s head. I didn’t catch another glimpse of this genre incubus
until a packed screening of The Guest a
year later, when he treated us all to the sight of Dan Stevens and his
perfectly-formed abs gunning down military commandos, beaming a beautiful
smile. His addition to The ABCs of Death did little to stave off my
fawning, and the early buzz heralding Blair
Witch (originally disguised as The
Woods until the last possible moment, ala 10 Cloverfield Lane) as a
new dawn for horror gave me the sort of anxious excitement usually reserved for
a bride or groom the night before the wedding.
What I actually found awaiting me at the cinematic altar
wasn’t exactly a jilt, but my fiancée was thirty minutes late, seemed very
indifferent about the whole thing and their entire demeanour smacked of stale
resignation. Blair Witch is something of a disappointment, but I
still found it genuinely terrifying, and that’s due to one very simple thing:
it sounds reductive, but whether or not this follow-up to 1999’s unspeakably
successful found footage chiller scares you or not entirely depends on how
afraid of the dark you are.
When it comes to horror, some things designed to scare can
be easily overcome: monsters can be dismissed as fantasy and gore is only
human, but the totally inescapable, unfathomable void of the woods at night
reaches beyond that. It's an environment where every aspect appears identical, where every move you make could be a step towards safety...or another mile
from home. As someone who got dragged on midnight walks through wooded areas by
friends as a teenager, I couldn’t help but sympathise with the protagonists of Blair Witch, when every creaking branch
or cracking twig might as well be the sounding of a death knell.
The story picks up seventeen years after Heather, Josh and
Mike disappeared in Maryland. After hours spent perusing what footage could be
salvaged, Heather’s brother, James (James Allen McCune), still refuses to
believe his sister is dead. With a selection of modern video equipment
(ear-mounted cameras, night-vision lookout cams and even a surveillance drone)
in tow, James and his three friends – begrudgingly working with two
forest-savvy weirdos – return to the woods hoping to find her.
In complete opposition to its predecessor, Blair Witch is a film best seen without
any exposure to marketing. Whereas The
Blair Witch Project owed much of its success to an ad campaign that sold
viewers on the idea that what they witnessed really happened, the sequel is sold to us primarily as fiction,
with quotes like ‘the scariest movie
you will ever see’ and ‘a new beginning for the
genre’ littered across the poster. The film itself, too, seems completely
uninterested in selling itself as a representation of actual events. The
quality of video in 1999 was so poor that most of the chills emerged from fuzzy
silhouettes and dim shadows that could be anything from the shade cast by a
bush to a malevolent presence, but – having entered the era of high-definition
– this suggestive source of fear is neutered. No longer used as an anchor to
reality, the new technology is simply a new method of deploying hit-and-miss jump
scares from multiple angles.
Speaking of which; a first and second act that rely almost
entirely on false starts and eye-rolling fake-out frights is too much to be
undone by a few seconds of self-awareness. You can have James’ friend (possibly
girlfriend, it’s never explicitly stated), Lisa, begging “Can everyone please stop
doing that?” all you like, but that doesn’t change the fact you’re not actually
doing anything interesting with a now tortuously commonplace method for
spooking the audience.
However, just when you think the film has completely lost
all nerve, the final movement arrives and we’re subjected to thirty
pulse-pounding minutes of masterfully-sustained terror. I’ve sheepishly had to
ask friends what happened during certain moments because a grid of trembling
fingers obscured my vision as I cowered in my seat. It’s
true that the impact of a film can be extensively influenced by the circumstances
under which you watch it: the first and only time I saw the original Blair Witch Project was on an
oppressively hot summer night, in total darkness and extreme discomfort, and I’m
cautious to return to it in more comfortable circumstances lest the effect is
reduced. The circumstances surrounding my viewing of the sequel could not have been more different (lounging
in a plush leather seat with a bag of sweets), yet the finale was still totally
successful in chilling me to the bone.
With roaring sound design and hurried, frantic camerawork,
this is a purely sensory experience, removed from the part-horror,
part-heartbreak of Heather’s legendary “I’m scared to close my eyes…I’m scared
to open them” moment. It’s an incredibly visceral carnival ride, devoid of the
genuine emotion visible in Wingard’s previous work (think The Guest’s gleeful attitude to excess or the satisfying payback element of You're Next), but inhabited by believably
panic-stricken protagonists, who very effectively sell an emerging sense of
claustrophobic confusion and despair.
So, dear Adam’s still in my good books: we’ve had the
revelatory first date, the perfect engagement party, and now the somewhat stilted wedding
ceremony. Let’s hope the coming reception, removed from a myriad of
obligations, is a night to remember.
