Remember The Blair Witch Project? The largely improvised horror film which taught the world that it was possible to get seasick while watching a movie and wrongly convinced a lot of people that they too could be horror directors? That one.
Well, twenty years after its release,the world is getting an expansion of the Blair Witchoverse which includes a video game, a new Netflix series and a cinematic sequel which ignores the previous sequels, just as all humanity should.
The game trailer was launched at E3 and at first blush it looks awfully like Silent Hill (which coincidentally also came out in 1999) – man in unfamiliar, supernaturally-tinged place where a character waves a torch around a lot while spooky things happen just out of view.
But here’s the thing: B-Witch Proj wasn’t a success because it created a rich and exciting universe which viewers yearned to explore. It was a success because it was an utterly pioneering concept – or, if you want to be dismissive, gimmick.
Still amazing.
It’s impossible to overemphasise how groundbreaking it was at the time. It created the “found footage” trope, it looked like nothing else, and it took horror in a fresh new direction which has been done to death over the last 20 years. Grainy video. Jump scares. Claustrophobic first person perspective. Endings that make you go “what the hell jusOH MY GOD”.
Seeing it for the first time in a cinema was a genuinely terrifying thing because the idea of a horror documentary was brave and new, and also most people hadn’t learned to assume that almost all documentaries were bullshit at that stage.
So to be good the new Blair Witch material is going to have to a) be recognisably Blair Witchy and b) still somehow avoid all the tired old tropes it invented and which everyone has now seen a billion times.
And if this video game trailer is any indication, that ain’t happening. Even Silent Hill realised that it was getting to Silent Hill-y by 2012 and quietly deep sixed itself.
Because by the third game it was already running out of ideas?
The game has some baggage to get over too since the Blairosphere has already been explored in the video game medium, the most recent – 2001’s Blair Witch Volume 3: The Elly Kedward Tale – being praised by PC Gamer as being “amazingly mediocre“. High praise!
And look, there’s a way to take something that defined unsettling and creepy and make it even more unsettling and creepy decades on – hell, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks The Return still haunts my nightmares – but let’s be honest, that’s unlikely to happen here.
Honestly, entertainment industry. It’s OK to go “this franchise isn’t a franchise, let’s develop something new” every so often.