

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

To be completely honest, I’ve developed a little bit of a crush on director Adam Wingard. I’d never even heard of him until 2013, when I went to see You’re Next completely on a whim, and had an absolute whale of a time watching Sharni Vinson stick a blender in someone’s head. I didn’t catch another glimpse of this genre incubus until a packed screening of The Guest a year later, when he treated us all to the sight of Dan Stevens and his perfectly-formed abs gunning down military commandos, beaming a beautiful smile. His addition to The ABCs of Death did little to stave off my fawning, and the early buzz heralding Blair Witch (originally disguised as The Woods until the last possible moment, ala 10 Cloverfield Lane) as a new dawn for horror gave me the sort of anxious excitement usually reserved for a bride or groom the night before the wedding.





What I actually found awaiting me at the cinematic altar wasn’t exactly a jilt, but my fiancée was thirty minutes late, seemed very indifferent about the whole thing and their entire demeanour smacked of stale resignation. Blair Witch is something of a disappointment, but I still found it genuinely terrifying, and that’s due to one very simple thing: it sounds reductive, but whether or not this follow-up to 1999’s unspeakably successful found footage chiller scares you or not entirely depends on how afraid of the dark you are.





When it comes to horror, some things designed to scare can be easily overcome: monsters can be dismissed as fantasy and gore is only human, but the totally inescapable, unfathomable void of the woods at night reaches beyond that. It's an environment where every aspect appears identical, where every move you make could be a step towards safety...or another mile from home. As someone who got dragged on midnight walks through wooded areas by friends as a teenager, I couldn’t help but sympathise with the protagonists of Blair Witch, when every creaking branch or cracking twig might as well be the sounding of a death knell.





The story picks up seventeen years after Heather, Josh and Mike disappeared in Maryland. After hours spent perusing what footage could be salvaged, Heather’s brother, James (James Allen McCune), still refuses to believe his sister is dead. With a selection of modern video equipment (ear-mounted cameras, night-vision lookout cams and even a surveillance drone) in tow, James and his three friends – begrudgingly working with two forest-savvy weirdos – return to the woods hoping to find her.





In complete opposition to its predecessor, Blair Witch is a film best seen without any exposure to marketing. Whereas The Blair Witch Project owed much of its success to an ad campaign that sold viewers on the idea that what they witnessed really happened, the sequel is sold to us primarily as fiction, with quotes like ‘the scariest movie you will ever see’ and ‘a new beginning for the genre’ littered across the poster. The film itself, too, seems completely uninterested in selling itself as a representation of actual events. The quality of video in 1999 was so poor that most of the chills emerged from fuzzy silhouettes and dim shadows that could be anything from the shade cast by a bush to a malevolent presence, but – having entered the era of high-definition – this suggestive source of fear is neutered. No longer used as an anchor to reality, the new technology is simply a new method of deploying hit-and-miss jump scares from multiple angles.





Speaking of which; a first and second act that rely almost entirely on false starts and eye-rolling fake-out frights is too much to be undone by a few seconds of self-awareness. You can have James’ friend (possibly girlfriend, it’s never explicitly stated), Lisa, begging “Can everyone please stop doing that?” all you like, but that doesn’t change the fact you’re not actually doing anything interesting with a now tortuously commonplace method for spooking the audience.





However, just when you think the film has completely lost all nerve, the final movement arrives and we’re subjected to thirty pulse-pounding minutes of masterfully-sustained terror. I’ve sheepishly had to ask friends what happened during certain moments because a grid of trembling fingers obscured my vision as I cowered in my seat. It’s true that the impact of a film can be extensively influenced by the circumstances under which you watch it: the first and only time I saw the original Blair Witch Project was on an oppressively hot summer night, in total darkness and extreme discomfort, and I’m cautious to return to it in more comfortable circumstances lest the effect is reduced. The circumstances surrounding my viewing of the sequel could not have been more different (lounging in a plush leather seat with a bag of sweets), yet the finale was still totally successful in chilling me to the bone.





With roaring sound design and hurried, frantic camerawork, this is a purely sensory experience, removed from the part-horror, part-heartbreak of Heather’s legendary “I’m scared to close my eyes…I’m scared to open them” moment. It’s an incredibly visceral carnival ride, devoid of the genuine emotion visible in Wingard’s previous work (think The Guest’s gleeful attitude to excess or the satisfying payback element of You're Next), but inhabited by believably panic-stricken protagonists, who very effectively sell an emerging sense of claustrophobic confusion and despair.





So, dear Adam’s still in my good books: we’ve had the revelatory first date, the perfect engagement party, and now the somewhat stilted wedding ceremony. Let’s hope the coming reception, removed from a myriad of obligations, is a night to remember.