His friends decide to go looking for her, and one of them, Lisa (Callie Hernandez), decides to make their search the subject of a documentary for her film class. James (James Allen McCune), whose sister Heather vanished in the woods back in the 1990s, goes off looking for her after a grainy video purporting to show footage of a house in the woods is posted onto YouTube by a local resident of Burkittsville. This brings me to Blair Witch, a sequel to the original film updated for modern audiences. At this point we’re left with a clever bit of filmmaking that leaves the viewer at best unsettled, and at worst bored. The Blair Witch Project is wholly a product from the ‘90s, from the flannel shirts to the grainy video reels, and when a film’s frights are based on the unsettling question of its reality and the mythology woven by its background material, each year that goes by is like a radioactive half-life for the scare factor. Unfortunately, the original film doesn’t seem to hold up too well. This genius viral marketing campaign, combined with then-novel found footage style filmmaking, made The Blair Witch Project a unique entry into the horror genre. Their camera equipment had just been found, but the kids had yet to be seen. Apparently, they had been filming a documentary called The Blair Witch Project about a local urban legend. If we were on campus in 1999, we might have seen a poster on the Rand bulletin board with the faces of three hikers about our age who had gone missing in the forests near Burkittsville, Maryland. This week I had the chance to watch the original 1999 film before heading to the theater for the sequel. That feeling you get when you stare too long into the darkness and think you saw something, that sense of dread that begins to fill the pit of your stomach, the monsters that live out of the corners of your eyes, that’s what the Blair Witch movies turn up to 11 when they’re doing everything right. Each silhouette of an oak tree had something hiding behind it, each cracking branch could be, well, anything at all. Just a few yards away from our campsite would be enough for the imagination to take over, for the mind to start racing. During these trips there would be times – not that many, few and far between – where you might find yourself alone in the woods after dark.
It could get fairly chilly in the Florida winter, so at night we would set campfires, and head off into the forests to collect firewood.
During the day, we would hike, canoe, and explore the outdoors. Throughout most of my youth, I was involved in the Boy Scouts, and during the school year, our troop would go on camping trips at least once a month.
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