Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Blair Witch’ on Hulu, An Update On The 1999 Found Footage Trendsetter

You’re Next, The Guest, and now Godzilla vs. Kong director Adam Wingard was handed the reins to the Blair Witch franchise for this strikethrough of the shoddy 2000 sequel. Blair Witch (Hulu) continues the freaky forest action where the found footage horror hit left off, but more than a sequel, this Blair plays like a boutique love letter to the original.

BLAIR WITCH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: This Blair Witch lays bare its connective fibers to the 1999 original with a savvy update of the found footage gimmick: James (James Allen McCune), whose sister Heather disappeared during the first Blair Witch Project, finds a YouTube clip of footage purported to be from that fateful expedition. Full of optimism that it represents a new lead in solving the mystery, James mounts a new journey into the forest where it all went down, which will be documented by his film school student girlfriend Lisa (Callie Hernandez). Peter (Brandon Scott), James’ best friend and a salty skeptic, and Peter’s girlfriend Ashley (Corbin Reid) come along for the ride, and the jovial crew makes way to the boundless woods of rural Maryland. Once there they hook up with Lane and Talia (Wes Robinson, Valorie Curry), two locals who claim to have found the uploaded footage in the forest.

“This area has a history of things happening that no one really likes to talk about,” Lane tells the group as they traipse into the trees. He and Talia also relate their sense of who the Blair Witch was, an 18th century woman accused of witchcraft by the townspeople of Blair, who then left her to die in these very woods. Uneasy mood set, the group beds down at their camp, only to hear numerous things go bump and crack in the night. Things get even weirder the next day, when time itself seems to have warped, their GPS systems have gone haywire, and the forest starts to close in around them. Cursed pagan lashings appear. People cry out desperately for their comrades, crashing through the underbrush in mounting panic. And when a scary house emerges from the wooded gloom, James feels compelled to search it for signs of Heather. Good luck with that.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The OG Blair Witch Project, released in 1999, banked $250 million off a comparatively miniscule budget and spawned an entire epoch of found footage horror, everything from Cloverfield to the Paranormal Activity films. But don’t forget about Trollhunter, the 2010 fantasy found footage comedy about trolls stalking a film crew in the wilds of Norway.

Performance Worth Watching: As Lane and Talia, the local druggies and Internet sleuths known collectively as “Darknet666,” Wes Robinson and Valorie Curry come off as more real, and more respecting of the forces at work in the vast forest, than the straight-laced college kids investigating the Blair Witch who hire them as guides.

Memorable Dialogue: “Look, we faked it because it’s real, okay? There really is something happening here, guys, in these woods!” In a film that delights in deploying numerous feints, Wes Robinson, as the local stoner and Burkittsville, MD conspiracist Lane, somehow sells this true or false tap dance.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Adam Wingard is no student filmmaker, but his Blair Witch does at times feel like a fawning sketch, like his assignment was to essay the original and he leapt at the chance. The found footage gag, set up with a stern disclaimer (“footage was assembled from memory cards and DV tapes found in the Black Hills Forest…”), is tweaked with the addition of earpiece cams embedded with GPS, a quadcopter camera, and megapixeled DSLRs. And that in turn allows Wingard to tweak the formula with increased acuity of nighttime footage, sparkling, crackling digital sound, and aerials to convey how alone these people are in their witchy quest. One character even meets her demise during an attempt to free the damn quadcopter from where it crash-landed in the trees.

Still, in all of this gleeful filmmaking, what’s left on the cutting room floor are actual scares. Sure, there’s lots of creepy noises, pagan imagery, and a general pall of foreboding — the forest itself is a character made fearsome. But if you’re expecting this sequel to clarify or reveal what’s really up with all of these Blair Witch disappearances, you’ll be disappointed. Wingard is more interested in biting around the edges of the burger, remaining noncommittal on freaky facts while flinging new angles on all of this business into the fray, like the down is up sense of time that afflicts the group and is then forgotten about. There are also lengthy stretches of characters calling for each other in the dark that lead to nowhere but you reverse engineering the shot, attempting to fit it into the found footage equation. Blair Witch does deliver a few jumps in the night. But in the end it’s mostly a technical appreciation of its source material.

Our Call: STREAM IT, but only if you haven’t yet tired of the found footage gambit, with all of its shaky POV shots and manufactured happenstance. That said, horror heads will admire the craft Wingard employs in his Blair Witch take.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Blair Witch on Hulu