![]() He heads back out to the Burkittsville woods after a new tape is discovered by some local Blair Witch “experts.” (It’s a little upsetting, as a person who remembers watching The Blair Witch Project in the theater like it was yesterday, to learn that someone who was four years old when the original came out looks like this now. James, the premise goes, is the younger brother of Heather, and he been haunted by his sister’s disappearance. We might feel a lot less safe than we used to, but the idea of being lost in the woods, which provides so many of the original’s scares, is almost a forgotten concept in an age of smartphones and Google Maps. ![]() ![]() Theoretically, a Blair Witch sequel-one in which a whole new generation of cocky kids who think their GPS and drone cameras will save them in the forest-makes a certain amount of sense. Now, when you watch the original film, we’re onto the trick-the film is less existential terror and more three idiots yelling each other’s names for 80 minutes, unable to hold a camera straight. They thought they had nothing to worry about, because none of us did. Three student filmmakers wander into a forest-what did they have to worry about? One of the deepest terrors of The Blair Watch Project was the realization that the savvy and ironic remove of Heather, Josh, and Mike was what doomed them. It felt like the world had been, sort of, solved. In the last year of the twentieth-century we weren’t at war, the internet was making the world smaller in what seemed to be a good way, and the economy was humming. But even with that, I’d argue the scariest thing about the original Blair Witch is how it meticulously stripped away the protective illusion that we were all safe. The found footage, the fake website, and the anonymity of the actors, meant that millions of audience members mistook it for a documentary. You might not believe me, but the original The Blair Witch Project, when it came out in 1999, was one of the scariest movies I had ever seen.
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