You can probably figure out if you’re going to like Blair Witch based on nothing more than the shift in its score on Rotten Tomatoes. Up until about a week before release the surprise sequel to the 1999 surprise blockbuster was sitting at a perfect 100% positive rating. This was when the only people reviewing the movie were horror fans curious enough about an unknown property called The Woods to go and see it at a special screening at Comic Con. Of course, in a trick of marketing, The Woods turned out to be Blair Witch, and the people who got to experience that switch came out buzzing about how great the film was. But when Blair Witch screened for the wider pool of film critics, its rating started to plummet down and down and down, until it came to rest somewhere in the neighborhood of a solidly rotten 36%.

We’ve talked about the divide between horror fans and conventional movie critics in the past, but it’s fascinating to see that split displayed so clearly in such a short time. And it’s hard to imagine a film more perfectly designed to highlight that divide than Blair Witch.

Blair Witch does only one thing right. It scares the pants off of you. The whole movie is engineered with terror in mind. There are jump scares and unsettling loud noises, and the audience can sample from a seemingly endless buffet of existential horror, body horror, claustrophobia, and paranoia. That isn’t to say it is the scariest movie you’ll ever see, but the odds are good that if you’re a horror fan you’ll find something here to unsettle you. I can respect a film for doing one thing and doing it really well, so there’s a part of me that really dug Blair Witch.

The problem is, the whole film feels intensely shallow. It’s chock full of “cool” moments, but there’s nothing underneath those moments, no deeper themes, no thought provoking metaphors, nothing but another scare, another cool reveal just around the corner until it runs its course and the film is over.

Blair Witch never makes us feel one second of empathy for why anyone in this film is doing anything. A painfully on-the-nose voice-over near the beginning of the film tells us James is obsessed with finding his sister, but we never actually see him being obsessed. We never understand why he believes the video some random internet weirdo posted to his YouTube channel is enough evidence to trek out into the woods searching for his sister who has been missing for twenty years.

Speaking of aforesaid internet weirdo, we never get a feel for what his drive is either. Again we’re eventually told why he’s doing what he’s doing, but there’s never any narrative weight to that information, because we never get to experience his point of view.

And perhaps the worst offender when it comes to narrative and dramatic motivation is the eponymous witch herself. We get a quick summary of the legend of the witch from the first movie, but it quickly becomes apparent the entity our protagonists are dealing with is far more powerful than some old woman who died three hundred years ago has any right to be. And there’s no logic to how or why she attacks. In one scene she puts a parasite in someone’s foot, in another she knocks down entire trees, in still another she makes everyone in the camp sleep in way late. And her powers are essentially unlimited, removing even the slightest illusion that the protagonists might find a way to escape her grasp. Her actions are so erratic she comes across not as a vengeful spirit, but an all-powerful bully who’s just tormenting these people for kicks.

All of this is before you add in the considerable baggage that the found-footage conceit brings to the film. The Blair Witch Project popularized the found-footage aesthetic in a big way, but very few films have followed the same fiercely minimalistic approach that made that film feel so raw and real (The Dirties comes close). Instead, the found footage films that followed in The Blair Witch Project‘s footsteps have largely erred on the side of a more manufactured kind of chaos, with carefully scripted “candid” performances and professional cinematographers shaking the camera just so. Blair Witch breaks no new ground in this regard, and in fact it feels so over-produced and intentionally plotted that it raises the question why the film needed to be found-footage at all. Director Adam Wingaurd has said repeatedly that he wanted to bring something new to the franchise, but apparently he couldn’t find it in himself to bring anything as revolutionary as a steadicam.

In the lineage of found footage films Blair Witch feels more like a grade-school love letter to Marble Hornets and YellowBrickRoad than a sequel to the film that convinced so many movie-goers that it was real in 1999. All-told, Blair Witch isn’t exactly a bad film. If you’re a horror fan you’ll likely find something here to enjoy. But all of its charms are thin and insubstantial. It falls into the common traps of the found footage genre and it is unlikely to appeal to movie-goers looking for something more substantial in terms of character and plot. Fortunately for those looking for a movie about a witch released this year with actual cinematography and a more substantial plot, there’s something out there for you too.



