1999’s The Blair Witch Project was absolutely terrifying in its first month of release. In retrospect, it sounds ridiculous, but audiences at the time genuinely believed the movie was real, helped along by an excellent fake website, the absence of social media debunkers, and a perfect advertising campaign.
But once the movie hit big it didn’t take long for those fears to drain away. A backlash soon formed against its wild success and soon you couldn’t move for parodies of the iconic snotty-nosed direct-to-camera shot. The following year the terrible Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 dropped and promptly disappeared, with its plot completely ignored by 2016’s Blair Witch. The latter was okay but didn’t exactly set the world on fire.
However, the 2016 movie did make $45 million on a $5 million, so now rumors are building that Lionsgate is going back into the woods as per Hollywood gossip hound Jeff Sneider.
The idea of a new Blair Witch dealing with how we’re still vulnerable in the woods despite modern tech would be fun, though that territory was covered in the 2016 film. In that film, the instigating moment was the discovery of a YouTube video referencing the original movie, followed by an expedition into rural Maryland that included using a drone for navigation.
It’s obviously early days for this reboot, though we hope they keep the found footage style going and find some kind of new twist on the concept. Perhaps nobody was really demanding a new Blair Witch movie, though if one is coming let’s just pray it does justice to the spine-tingling original.