These are all used or worn by documentarian Lisa (Callie Hernandez) and her friends, James (James Allen McCune), Ashley (Corbin Reid), and Peter (Brandon Scott), as they travel into the Black Hills of Maryland in hopes of finding Rustin Parr’s house. This time, the cameras have been updated from 16mm and Hi-8 video to all manner of digital cameras – a Canon digital SLR, a drone, and Bluetooth-style earpiece cameras with GPS capability.
Motion sickness-prone viewers, be warned: there is very little respite from the first-person shakycam which so notoriously nauseated audiences in 1999. The film pins us to our seats and dares us to let go of our armrests, which – if you straight-up loved the original like I did – you’ll already be white-knuckling by the 20-minute mark. Gone is the “Hey, remember what that guy said the other day?” trite style of exposition screenwriter Simon Barrett has pared this film down to a lean and absolutely mean, 89-minute, all-out assault on the senses. Equal parts sequel, reboot, and remake, Blair Witch takes the best of what worked in the original The Blair Witch Project and injects it with 21 st century digital know-how. Let’s put it in blunt terms: Blair Witch is one scary, nerve-wracking son of a bitch. Titled simply Blair Witch, the film was set for a September bow, right in time for the spooks to come out during the Halloween season. Taking a similar tactic, at the 2016 San Diego Comic-Con, film studio Lionsgate blew the world’s mind by announcing that their fall release The Woods was, in fact, a long-awaited sequel to 1999’s breakout found footage shocker The Blair Witch Project. Earlier this year, Paramount Pictures announced 10 Cloverfield Lane a mere two months before its blockbuster March release.