Blair Witch
Director: Adam Wingard
Screenwriter: Simon Barrett
Cast: James Allen McCune, Callie Hernandez, Brandon Scott, Corbin Reid, Wes Robinson, Valorie Curry
Distributor: Lionsgate
Rated R | 93 Minutes
Release Date: September 16, 2016

Friday, July 30, 1999. My friends and I — high school kids stuck in a rural, one-stoplight town — piled into a car and drove 30 miles to the nearest movie theater to see The Blair Witch Project on opening night. For all we knew it was real; the recovered, reassembled footage of three student filmmakers who ventured into the Black Hills Forest near Burkittsville, Maryland to film a documentary about the Blair Witch, a local legend. The students were never seen again, and we were about to witness something akin to supernatural snuff — evidence of the strange and inexplicable, the terrifying final moments of three young people.

Blair Witch
Director: Adam Wingard
Screenwriter: Simon Barrett
Cast: James Allen McCune, Callie Hernandez, Valorie Curry, Brandon Scott
Distributor: Lionsgate
Rated R | 93 Minutes
Release Date: September 16, 2016

Horror is a genre that exists to be mimicked and imitated. When John Carpenter’s Halloween debuted and shattered box offices in 1978 it started a decade-long slasher craze. While “found footage” films existed before 1999, that year’s surprise smash hit The Blair Witch Project turned a little-used subgenre of horror into the next big thing. Made on a miniscule $60,000 budget, the film grossed over $140 million and finished 10th in the 1999 box office standings. It’s hard to remember a time before the Internet was the biggest thing in Earth, but in 1999 the phrase “going viral” still referred to diseases. Hence when filmmakers spread a viral campaign that insisted that the movie was actually recovered documentary footage and that the filmmakers/actors were lost and maybe dead, people really believed it! Fast forward 17 years and one of the kings of mumblegore, Adam Wingard, revealed at this summer’s SDCC that his upcoming found-footage film The Woods was actually a sequel to The Blair Witch Project. Simply entitled Blair Witch, the film comes out in theaters this Friday, but I was able to attended a press screening last night.