You may have heard about a little horror film called ‘The Woods’ heading for theaters soon. At Comic-Con on Friday night, it was revealed that ‘The Woods’ is actually a sequel to the 1999 hit film The Blair Witch Project.
‘The Woods’ has been re-named ‘Blair Witch’ and the first super scary trailer for the film has arrived.
via USA Today:
Going back to the found-footage roots of the original 1999 film, Blair Witch features a new group of college kids going into the legendarily creepy Black Hills Forest inBurkittsville, Md. James (James Allen McCune) thinks he sees his sister — who disappeared in that first doomed mission into the woods years earlier — in a YouTube video and gathers friends to go back to the spooky house and see if she’s OK.
Some familiar eerie wooden totems start showing up, and things go south quickly.
“We wanted an experience like a haunted hayride through the Blair Witch woods,” Wingard said in a post-screening discussion.
“It was almost like a Star Wars-level secrecy process,” said producer Keith Calder.
During casting and before the film’s 34-day shoot in Vancouver, none of the actors knew the real nature of the project, Barrett said. “I think they just thought they were auditioning for the worst Blair Witch ripoff ever.”
Wingard and Barrett both were big fans of the original — Wingard admitted that he saw it six times in the theater. “Adam and I didn’t know it wasn’t real,” Barrett joked. But the 2000 sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 “never got back there” in building on the mythology, Wingard said.
So that’s what the new film focuses on while also being different: For example, Barrett plays with the concept of temporal reality in some of the key sequences, yet the iconic basement of the old house in Blair Witch is completely accurate to the original. (They did take some freedom in creating the rest of the place.)
Barrett said that it felt like it was about time for a Blair Witch sequel. “We just didn’t want anyone else to do it. We’re the guys.”
If they did this right, ‘Blair Witch’ has the potential to be one of the best horror sequels in recent memory. Watch the trailer below.
