With credits on projects V/H/S, You're Next and television series Outcast, Adam Wingard is regarded as one of the most exciting figures currently working in horror. Not that he understands why.

"Ultimately when you look at my filmography, I've never made a horror," he tells me days away from finishing shooting his feature-length Netflix adaptation of popular manga series Death Note in Vancouver.

That's until now. Back in July, it was announced that the American filmmaker's new film The Woods was, in fact, a direct sequel to found-footage horror smash The Blair Witch Project (1999). Simply titled Blair Witch, it emerged he had been making it for the previous three years.

We spoke to Wingard - best known for directing Dan Stevens in The Guest - about his attempts to salvage the franchise following its doomed sequel Book of Shadows (2002), the struggles of keeping the lid on such an event film and the bold twist he and write Simon Barrett decided to steer the series towards.

Blair Witch - Extended Trailer



Was keeping Blair Witch secret as agonising as it sounds?

Yeah, it absolutely was. We signed on to do this film in 2013 with Lionsgate. It was so long ago that when I signed on, the stipulation was that that we filmed The Guest first. We didn’t want to tell anybody so we’ve been holding this secret for quite some time to the point that I was so paranoid about saying the words 'Blair Witch' out loud in public that when we did announce it, it felt completely wrong. I'd so accustomed myself to saying The Woods, It took me little while to train myself back into saying the real name of the movie,

It's impressive that a film of this stature can be kept secret in such a day and age driven by the web. Was it always the intention?

The original is well known for its unique marketing - it’s basically synonymous with the movie itself - so we knew we had to do something; we didn’t actually know what it was. We were [originally] keeping it secret because in this day and age there are just so many sequels and remakes; we were kind of afraid that if we came out of the box and said we were making this film, there would be a backlash against it because everybody’s instincts these days are "Oh, Hollywood has run out of ideas." That wasn’t the case; we came into this film from a position of love for the material and wanting to see a good sequel to Blair Witch because Simon [Barrett, screenwriter] and I were both big fans of the original. When it came out, I saw it six times on video. Book of Shadows just killed the whole thing for me. It was so disappointing, it almost knocked the legitimacy of Blair Witch off the map for years. You can be precious about something like Blair Witch and say, 'How dare you approach it as a sequel or remake' or whatever, but its legacy was so tarnished by Book of Shadows that someone had to come in and do something in the spirit of the original.

You've been cited as a saviour of the horror genre. Did that create a pressure?

It's kind of funny because I've definitely been cited as a horror filmmaker but ultimately when you really look at my filmography I've never made a straight horror movie. You're Next was essentially a meta-comedy, The Guest was a thriller that used horror stylisation and themes and images, but it really wasn't a horror film at all. I've never made a movie where my whole purpose was tp scare the shit out of people, and Blair Witch was the first time I went full-on horror - my whole goal with this project was to scare the shit out of people.

Do you worry that a potential Blair Witch sequel could go the same way as Book of Shadows?

I never really want to get into sequels until you see some financial gain . A lot of people ask me 'are you going to do a sequel to The Guest or You're Next' - those movies weren’t financially viable so, even though there are a lot of fans of it, it’d be a pretty small market we’d be appealing to. It's got to be a big hit for you to really justify that. So if this movie opens up well, we already have ideas of where we’d take it. Even if I don’t direct a sequel, I'm definitely going to be heavily involved in terms of picking the director and making sure the whole thing has a high-quality standard.

*Blair Witch spoilers follow*

The film sees an intriguing twist surrounding the subject of time. What inspired you to go down that route?

The time element was always there in the original film, it was just more subtly played. From a practical standpoint, we were thinking everything that's scary in The Blair Witch Project always happens at nighttime, each segment of the first film is about waiting for the night because you know shit’s going to hit the fan. So we used the time format to our advantage to make it nighttime pretty much all the time so by the last half of the film, the sun never comes up. It adds to the claustrophobia of the scenario and the mystery but most importantly we keep you in the danger zone constantly. Once it gets to the halfway point, the movie doesn't really relent.

Best horror films of all-time Show all 10 1 /10 Best horror films of all-time Best horror films of all-time The Shining The retailer play.com used a heart rate monitor on film watchers to assess what horror films set pulses racing. The ‘Here’s Johnny’ scene in which Jack Nicholson peers through a hole in a door he has just created with an axe came up on top. The rest of the film isn’t any less scary as a writer coops his family up in an empty Colorado hotel for the winter. Stanley Kubrick creates tension at every turn, especially when he follows Danny riding his bicycle along the corridors. AP Best horror films of all-time Rosemary's Baby Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s best-seller is the daddy of demon baby movies. It involves a struggling couple, a pregnant Catholic girl and unemployed actor, played by Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, who move into an apartment block and are befriended by Satanist. The occult is scary, but not nearly as evil as Guy’s decision to sacrifice his wife for an acting role. Polanski’s brilliance is that the horror is not the supernatural but the doubts that brew up in our own minds. Paranoia reigns. Getty images Best horror films of all-time Psycho There is a sense of foreboding even before petty thief Vera Miles checks into the Bates motel. Then we are introduced to Norman Bates and his Oedipus complex. The fact that Bates on the surface seems mild-mannered and ordinary only made his transformation scarier. Showers would never be the same, in the must iconic murder scene on celluloid. Getty Images Best horror films of all-time Blue Velvet The huge amount of film noir elements in the narrative of David Lynch’s murder tale often see this 1986 American tale overlooked on horror lists. But this film is aimed to chill and has the aesthetics, pacing and tension of the greatest horror, including severed ears, dwarfs, and the supernatural. But it’s Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth that is the clincher, whenever he’s on screen, whether he’s harassing Isabelle Rossellini or encouraging singing, he’s the scariest character that has ever been on-screen. Best horror films of all-time Nosferatu - A Symphony of Horror The granddaddy of the genre, this silent masterpiece, an unauthorised adaptation of the Dracula tale (The Stoker estate won a case ordering all copies of the film destroyed, which was thankfully unenforceable in Germany), sees director FW Murnau establish many of the touchstones of the genre including vampires lusting after blood Getty Images Best horror films of all-time The Orphanage The haunted house is a staple of horror movies, especially of American horror. But it’s this Spanish gem from 2007 that is the scariest of them all. It starts with a mother whose attempts to deal with her childhood inner demons seeking closure by buying the orphanage in which she was born, and taking on the demands of looking after not just her own imaginative adopted son, but six other Orphans. What ensues is an eerie homage to Jack Clayton’s The Innocents that once again proves that nothing is as scary on film as creepy children. Best horror films of all-time Anti-Christ Lars von Trier’s says it was while he was undergoing cognitive therapy for depression that the idea to make a film exploring the semiotics and tools used by depression came to mind. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe play a couple coping with the death of their son. She cannot belief his response and he hers. The result is a film featuring gender mutilation, talking foxes and where chaos reigns. Booed at Cannes only seems to cement its status. Best horror films of all-time Don't Look Now Adaptations of Daphne du Maurier’s prose have a habit of making great horror films, especially in the hands of Alfred Hitchcock (Birds and Rebecca). British director Nic Roeg created this masterpiece when he took Maurier’s short story and meshed it with his trademark non-linear approach to the story of parents attempting to come to terms with the death of their young daughter by moving to Venice. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie give career best performances in a film that has a clairvoyant, serial killer, but most scary of all, feelings of guilt. Best horror films of all-time Suspiria There are not many directors who have made more horrors than Italian maestro Dario Argento. His 1976 effort Suspiria remains his masterpiece. An American ballet dancer goes to study in the Black Forest, where she meets a pair of lesbians administrators (Alida Valli and Joan Bennett), a bizarre shrink (Udo Kier, an actor who adds to the terror level of any movie) and discovers that the school was once a notorious witches’ coven. All this done in piercing Technicolor and a terrific synthesised score. Best horror films of all-time Audition J-Horror (Japanese horror) went through a purple patch at the end of the 90s with Hideo Nakata’s excellent Dark Water follow Ring trilogies. However, the most chilling film of the era was directed by Takeshi Miike, who makes films like they are cups of morning coffee. He uses the casting couch as the source of his evil as a friend tries to find a television producer a new wife by hosting a fake casting call. Miike slowly pulls us into the tale, as we discover dark secrets of both the widower and the actress who has caught his eye.

Why do you think genuinely scary horror films are so rare these days?

I think the hardest part about making a scary film is about being able to retain the mystery especially when it comes to supernatural stuff. What's really scary about the original Blair Witch is that it doesn’t really answer any questions so what makes that ending so scary is you walk out feeling dirty because you don’t even know what happened. It feels wrong. All my favourite horror movies have that quality to it. I hope that's the legacy we’re continuing, this horror mystery feeling where it’s about the fear of what goes bump int he night but not actually seeing it. Even though we do show more in this film, we always try to do it in a way where maybe you're seeing something, maybe you’re not. It's a fun communal experience.

What do you plan to bring to Death Note that you don't get in the original anime?

Well, I think we’re bringing a real adult theme. It's different than other anime movies especially that have been done in the States – they're always PG-13, very highly stylised and imitate cartoons. We're going in this different direction which still has a feeling of an anime but it’s a hard R; it's very violent and there’s a lot of swearing which is cool because it’s still essentially about kids in high school. I grew up on movies for teenagers that are hard Rs so you can’t technically say they’re for teenagers but they really are. Death Note's that kind of thing.