Blair Witch - Sorry guys, I went to see it

The title says it all really.  I feel I have to apologise to my film-watching fraternity for going to see the remake of / sequel to (sigh) The Blair Witch Project after generating disparaging remarks about it both verbally and in print.  I had no intention of going anyway near this, but when Mark Kermode said it isn't as bad as it could have been, and I found myself with a spare Saturday morning last weekend, I decided to wander to the Cineworld at the NEC in Birmingham for a matinee showing.

First point of order - matinee showings of horror movies are excellent.  Some people think you want to go and watch a horror film at night.  But why go when the cinema's going to full?  What better way to experience a horror film than in the middle of the day when - if you're lucky - you get to sit by yourself in a large darkened room in front of a massive screen and surrounded by the modern soundscape of 21st century audio?  Horror indeed.

So, Blair Witch.  Set 20 years after the original, we follow James - younger brother of Heather (the one what was in the original film and did the much-parodied-at-the-time solo "... I'm sorry..." monologue into camera).  James wants to find out what happened to Heather, so he enlists the help of his film student friends and some local conspiracy weirdos.  They wander into the woods to try to find the house where Heather, Mike and JOSH! disappeared.  Guess what - they don't find them.

Though the film stays true to the idea of the original - that of the found footage - it adds a few extra things in that mess with the tone just enough to mean it isn't anywhere near as powerful.  The addition of more cameras, brighter, more crisp footage, and crucially a drone camera all tone down the film's claustrophobia.  Allowing us to see an establishing shot of the forest via a drone camera might be a clever way of allowing a found footage film to have an establishing shot; but by putting it in there the forest feels more and conquerable rather than all-enveloping.  The Blair Witch Project never for a moment let the audience out of the space its characters were inhabiting, and from there came its creeping terror.

The Blair Witch Project was terrifying because of what it didn't show you.  No need for jump scares.  No need for malformed humanoid entities to appear in the background.  No need for an unseen force to drag someone off into the bushes.  No need for a character to get an icky-looking wound that they can prod at in graphic detail.  No need for a scene of traumatic underground claustrophobia.  All this does is present the Blair Witch as an actual entity that we could fight if only we knew how.  All this is avoided in the original film, a film which is endlessly more terrifying as a result.

Blair Witch was not a waste of my time.  Its 89 minutes served as a reminder of just how groundbreaking and creepingly terrifying the original was.  You should take my word for it though, if it takes too much money at the box office they might start thinking about making another.