This also isn’t Wingard or Barrett’s first steps into the found footage world, having worked with Bloody Disgusting’s Brad Miska on anthology horror V/H/S and on its sequel V/H/S/2. “The good thing I had with the V/H/S films is that we had experienced so may different ways and facets of approaching found footage,” Wingard recalls. “From very sloppy to high-tech to Skype and everything. A dog wearing a camera, you know? We learned a lot of lessons about what worked and what didn’t work.” For V/H/S, Wingard directed the wrap-around “Tape 56” and the segment “Phase I – Clinical Trials” for the sequel, though he isn’t happy with either. “On [“Tape 56”], I was very much committed to the reality to the point of filming it on VHS, and making the camera work really sloppy,” he says. “And what I realised is that, in this day and age, people are so jaded by shakey camera work and stuff like that so it actually just annoyed them [Note: it really annoyed me]. Audiences weren’t on board with it. They’d seen it all before. So with the sequel, I directed the segment “Phase I – Clinical Trials”, which is about a guy who gets ocular implants and you see the whole thing from his POV, and it was a little more sci-fi found footage and clearly done in a way where the technology doesn’t exist. But it was a way of playing with cinematic gimmicks, and I stabilised the footage to get away from the shaky cam. And that one I went too far in the other direction, but it was a good experiment. So ultimately I came out of those films feeling disappointed about my approach [Note: I wasn’t keen on it either].”
While some may have found this level of disappointment a reason to steer clear of the genre, it only spurred Wingard to get better at it. “It was always in the back of my head that I felt unfulfilled with my foray into found footage, and that I could do better,” he says. “I was really disappointed in myself more than anything. I felt that my segments were the some of the least well received of that series. So I had this vendetta saying, ‘one day I’m going to get back and try and do something I’m really happy with’. And sure enough two weeks after we were at Sundance with V/H/S/2, Lionsgate came to us and asked us if we wanted to do Blair Witch. My first thought was, ‘this is my chance’. I’ve been wanting to do a straight horror movie. I’m known as a horror filmmaker, but I’ve never made a straight horror movie or something that wasn’t meta. I’ve never made something that scared people shitless. So when they brought up Blair Witch, it was two birds with one stone. I could redeem myself – at least in my eyes – in the found footage realm and I could make a horror movie. This was a perfect platform to do it.”
Wingard’s Blair Witch isn’t the first sequel to The Blair Witch Project, though many people have already forgotten about its pseudo-sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which Wingard argues is for good reason. “As a fan of the first movie when it came out, I was so disappointed with Book of Shadows, and it killed the legacy of the first film for me. It took me like ten years to watch the first movie again because of Book of Shadows. Honestly, I hated it so much. It made me second guess whether the first film was any good or not. Fortunately when I watched it years later, not only is the first film good, it’s aged incredibly well. It still stands up to today’s standards of found footage movies. In many ways, I felt the need to make a Blair Witch sequel because of Book of Shadows. It needed a pallet cleanser. I don’t know how many times that’s happened? A film that made $250 million and then had a sequel that just killed a franchise right away, It’s astounding.”
Released just over a year after The Blair Witch Project, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 earned just $47 million compared to the original’s $248 million. Director Joe Berlinger would later lament on the DVD commentary that Artisan (the production company behind the movie) re-cut the movie and removed more of the physiological aspects as well as adding in the nu-metal soundtrack including Marilyn Manson’s “Disposable Teens”. In essence, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 did kill the franchise dead before it even had a chance to grow. As I pointed out to Wingard during our conversation, not even Freddy’s Revenge killed A Nightmare on Elm Street. “Exactly,” he says laughing. “The main disappointment I had as a kid – aside from the horrible acting and casting and everything else – is that it felt it was better than the first movie and it looked down on it, which was ridiculous because it’s such a dumber movie. But also they didn’t understand the found footage aspect is what made the first film so interesting. I don’t care to see a movie about kids going into the woods and talking about the Blair Witch and shit if it’s not done in the same style as the first one.”
And it was the failures of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 that drove Wingard’s ideas on this sequel. “A lot of my thought process goes back to a nostalgic place when I’m picking my movies,” he says. “Your viewpoint when you’re a kid is so clean and responsive to what’s in front of you. So going into a sequel, I asked myself what I wanted to see when I was 18-years old when Book of Shadows came out. What would I have been happy with? What motifs did I want to repeat from the first films? Which did I not? There were certain things that were synonymous with the first film that I want to be redone and brought back, but it all comes back to, ‘what would young me enjoy about this?’”
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Originally published September 15, 2016. Updated November 30, 2022.
