This post contains massive spoilers for Blair Witch, the Blair Witch Project sequel that arrived in theaters this weekend.

Anyone hoping for The Blair Witch Project to reveal its mystery could go screw. Though the 1999 movie is littered with mythological hints, Heather, Michael, and Josh's search for answers amounted to their untimely deaths. Audiences never saw who or what attacked the trio; an unseen force "knocked" the camera out of Heather's hands and that was that.

Seasoned horror veterans Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett saw an opportunity to add to the Blair Witch Project mythology, but for their sequel, Blair Witch, to do justice, they had to play in the sandbox without kicking up too much sand. That was a risk Barrett, the new movie's writer, was willing to take.

"If there was just the The Blair Witch Project and nothing else, if it was just a classic found-footage horror film, I don't think I would have been as excited [to take on this project]," Barrett tells Thrillist. "But there were ancillary materials that took the mythology in a different direction. And as a fan, I always wanted to see a more direct sequel to what they were building in the first film. That was really enticing."

Anyone who caught Blair Witch this weekend knows the movie is full of violent paranormal activity and theory-worthy twists. To nestle it into the "Blair Witch" mythology that provoked so many imaginations starting in 1999, Barrett culled from backstory-building material written around the releases of The Blair Witch Project and its 2000 sequel, Book of Shadows. This includes the TV documentaries The Burkittsville 7 and Shadow of the Blair Witch (both directed by The Blair Witch Project production designer Ben Rock), the epistolary novel The Blair Witch Project: A Dossier, and The Blair Witch Cult, a book said to have been written in 1809 (it wasn't) and put on display at the Maryland Historical Society museum in 1991 (also bullshit).