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.

During San Diego Comic-Con 2016 last month it was revealed, much to the delight of horror fans everywhere, that the next movie from You’re Next and The Guest director Adam Wingard—known at the time as The Woods—was actually a super secret sequel to 1999’s The Blair Witch Project titled simply Blair Witch. Last year Eduardo Sanchez, who co-directed the original along with Daniel Myrick, said a new sequel was inevitable. Turns out he was right! Perhaps he knew something we did not.

A trailer was also released to go along with the announcement above, but now Lionsgate has a couple of new treats for those anticipating the movie. First up is a new TV spot, followed by an intro video for a 360 virtual reality experience in which you get to do a little exploring of the lovely Black Hills Forest of Burkittsville, Maryland.

You can enjoy both of these below.

A new horror film from Adam Wingard, the gifted director of the pulse-racing thrillers You’re Next and The Guest, is already a cause for celebration. But it turns out that his latest feature The Woods, a found-footage fright flick of which not much was known until now, is actually Blair Witch, a sequel to the 1999 minimalist horror classic The Blair Witch Project that became one of the biggest hits of that summer and one of the most profitable independent films ever released.

Lionsgate made the announcement early Friday evening at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con where they showed Blair Witch in full for the first time and marked the occasion by releasing the first trailer, poster, and image with the film’s official title attached. You can check them all out here below.

With how popular the found footage sub-genre has become since The Blair Witch Project arrived in 1999, making an astonishing $248.6 million worldwide on a tiny $60,000 budget, one would think more sequels than that one that shall not be named would have been made by now.

A third movie in the franchise has been whispered about from time to time over the years, and now one of the original’s directors is saying a new sequel is “inevitable.”

You can see what he had to say below.