
James’s group meets up with Lane and Talia, the locals who uploaded the video from a tape they found in the woods, and they all go in together.Īnd then they all fall apart. His group of friends includes a film student, Lisa (Callie Hernandez), who wants to make a documentary about the whole thing. He’s inspired in his quest by a recently uploaded video that he believes shows her recently alive. This is, of course, the Heather from the original film, whose closeup scene became iconic. James (James Allen McCune) and a group of friends venture into the Maryland woods in search of clues to the disappearance of James’s sister, Heather. Have you actually seen The Blair Witch Project? Great! You’ve seen this one, too.
#The blair witch project 2016 review movie#
I once said The Hangover 2 was like they xeroxed the first movie and stapled it to Thailand. Let me xerox that comment and staple it to this review. So when a mysterious little movie called The Woods turned out to be Barrett and Wingard’s Blair Witch update, it seemed promising, even though the phrase “found footage” makes my eye twitch now.

They also collaborated on horror flick You’re Next, a fun take on the home invasion trope.


One of the recent best in that genre is The Guest, written by Simon Barrett and directed by Adam Wingard. The resurgence of thrillers may have something to do with that. There’s still blood and guts aplenty, but generally, the best horror films today are more subtle. You just think you do.” A part of my soul is gone forever now.)Īnd now we’re here, halfway through the teens, when horror has finally quieted down. There has never been a finer review of that movie than Bloody Disgusting’s line, “ You don’t want to see Serbian Film. (I thought I did, until the end of the decade when I saw A Serbian Film. She doesn’t know what horror movies are like now. Halfway into the new movie, I saw her cringe and realized: Oh, yeah. I took my mother to see Rob Zombie’s Halloween. Horror was relentless, brutal, and gory, much like the zombie stories that exploded in popularity. It is, after all, the decade in which the phrase “torture porn” was coined. You could see the frustration, fear, anger, and the jadedness of the aughts bear itself out in many of the horror movies of the time.
#The blair witch project 2016 review tv#
The hand-wringing they used to do over the TV coverage of Vietnam seems quaint now, when we can watch beheadings on the internet. We’ve been at war so long that it seems Orwellian. This is the world in which the new Blair Witch finds us, seventeen years later and in the next century. We didn’t know that a scant two years from then, on an idle Tuesday, horror would come home. In the United States, we’d just about finished the decade and we didn’t know how good we had it. Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.” For one hour you are haunted, and you do not trust anybody, and then the feeling fades away. And when you remove your makeup in the mirror last thing, you see a strange look in your own eyes. You think this because there is a light on in your house that you are certain you did not leave on. Perhaps there are murderers lying in wait for you at home. Afterward you can go out of the cinema into the night and for a little while there is horror in everything. “In your country, if you are not scared enough already, you can go to watch a horror film. In remembering the experience afterward when we left the theater and drove home, I’m reminded of a quote from Chris Cleave’s Little Bee.

So when I saw the movie, it was with no real conception of what would happen. I remember seeing stories about it online, and maybe waiting a month for the website to load, but the majority of talk I heard took place in the real world, in places like video stores. It was the first movie to go viral, even though that wasn’t really a thing people said then. Four thousand years ago, when the original Blair Witch roared into theaters, much was made of the internet’s assistance in its success.
