Movies like the Blair Witch Project? I think this question violates the Community Guidelines. Chat or rant, adult content, spam, insulting other members,show more. The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 American horror film written and directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick. It was one of the first films to utilize the "found footage" filiming technique. Other films such as Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, and Paranormal Activity would use this same technique. · The Guardian - Back to home. make. but it’s ironic that The Blair Witch Project, filmed on. which is what is really scary in a horror film.” He has more. 8 Movies To Watch Before 'Blair Witch' Daniel. Witch Project — one of the most influential horror movies of its. the film is like one of those. I think this question violates the Terms of Service. Harm to minors, violence or threats, harassment or privacy invasion, impersonation or misrepresentation, fraud or phishing, show more. If you believe your intellectual property has been infringed and would like to file a complaint, please see our Copyright/IP Policy. ![]() Was The Blair Witch Project the last great horror film? template for Paranormal Activity and the like. viewers to imagine that Blair Witch wasn’t a movie. The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 American psychological horror film written, directed, and edited by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. It tells the fictional story. 10 horror movies inspired by The Blair Witch. is not — because just like those other horror classics, when Blair Witch. were filming themselves. Found footage also feels infinitely more connected to the modern age than nearly any traditional horror film. like Blair Witch. That Holocaust was filmed in. · Some horror movie directors don't seem. I felt like the makers of Blair Witch didn’t have any. Blair Witch is a stultifying film and it’s. Blair Witch (film) – Review « Visions From The Dark Side. Don’t go into the woods today. Some horror movie directors don’t seem to understand that just watching other people lose their shit from fear isn’t necessarilly scary; it can inspire other emotions depending on the context, like amusement, irritation, or even apathy. Quarantine, the extraneous remake of Spanish zombie film REC, was a good example: Jennifer Carpenter was a hysterical mess for the last 3. Blair Witch relies on the same technique, with equally disappointing results. The last half hour of Blair Witch see the surviving characters running around aimlessly while shouting each other’s names over and over again. The setting and events of the film are unsettling, but the OTT panicking and idiotic behaviour of the characters drains the proceedings of any tension. When I think back to unforgettably scary sequences in movies – the first kill in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the shower scene in Psycho, or the ending of Don’t Look Now – the characters themselves aren’t acting like they’re about to shit their pants from fear (not until the last second, anyway). The fear and tension comes from the dreadful atmosphere and the fact the audience has access to information the characters don’t. It’s true you can have effective extended sequences where someone is absolutely terrified (the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre), but if you try to keep that level up for too long you’ll just wear out your audience. I felt like the makers of Blair Witch didn’t have any ideas beyond mimicking the events of the first film, and sought to rely on on viewers having an uncritical reaction along the lines of “look, these guys are totally scared, so this must be a really frightening situation!”Blair Witch Project was an influential film that popularized the whole “found footage” genre, as well as the amateur shaky- cam visual style. It received plenty of critical accolades when it was released, but it also has a very mixed reputation among horror fans with many considering it rather overrated. This sequel, simply titled Blair Witch, is set two decades after the original, and sees the brother of one of the people who disappeared all those years ago going back to the woods to try and find out what happened to her. He manages to rope a couple of friends into joining him, and is also obliged to bring a couple of local horror nuts along as well (bad idea). The characters are cliched and lacking in charisma, and the script is moribund; there’s no wit or humour, and it’s hard to care about the characters even in the face of their inevitable fates. The Black Hills Forest in which the movie is set is actually quite atmospheric, and the first half of the film is functional if generic. The movie’s real problems start once things begin to go wrong in the forest, and it becomes clear that the makers of Blair Witch either didn’t trust their own abilities to create frightening sequences, or the capacity of its audience to pay attention. In the end, the surviving characters spend an eternity searching for each other in the dark, through the woods and abandoned buildings, breathing heavily and repeatedly calling out one another’s names. There’s nothing scary about it, it’s just inane and boring. Blair Witch is a stultifying film and it’s guaranteed to try the patience of most serious horror fans. Blair Witch review – efficient horror sequel | Film. In the mid- 1. 89. Parisians reportedly ran screaming from the Lumière brothers’ experimental short film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, terrified that the train coming towards them was about to run them down. A century later, cinemagoers were traumatised by The Blair Witch Project, unable to determine whether its faux- documentary story was fact or fiction. Kickstarting the “found footage” boom that has dominated 2. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez brilliantly reminded us that cinema’s greatest trick has always been in convincing us that what we are watching is “real”. Distributors Artisan famously picked up the no- budget The Blair Witch Project, with its unknown cast, for $1m and watched it make hundreds of millions worldwide. Now franchise inheritors Lionsgate have come searching for equally rich pickings. Reprising the DIY gimmick of its forerunner, albeit in less grainy style, Adam Wingard’s sequel Blair Witch finds young James (James Allen Mc. Cune) venturing into the Black Hills Forest in search of his sister Heather, who disappeared in October ’9. Accompanying him are film student Lisa (Callie Hernandez), eager to exploit James’s sibling anguish, and close friends Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid). For media- savvy audiences raised on Paranormal Activity, [Rec] et al the film's aesthetic is just business as usual. Unlike their predecessors, these ghostbusters have state- of- the- art hardware, from ear- piece cameras to a high- flying drone. An oddball pair who post online as “Darknet 6. James believes shows Heather alive in the woods. As before, internecine squabbling turns to terror when night falls, the fracturing group getting lost in spiralling circles of time and space, all captured on camera by the increasingly rattled participants. As genre fans know, The Blair Witch Project was not the first “found footage” movie. Predecessors include Ruggero Deodato’s 1. Cannibal Holocaust, which beat Myrick and Sánchez to the punch by nearly two decades, while Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler’s The Last Broadcast premiered the year before The Blair Witch Project took Sundance by storm. The story and characters depicted in this movie are entirely fictional,” read The Last Broadcast’s end credits, “but please don’t tell anyone.” Yet so convincing was The Blair Witch Project’s veneer of authenticity that many took it at face value, just like the radio audiences who mistook Orson Welles’s infamous 1. War of the Worlds broadcast for a real- life news report. The makers of this new Blair Witch have attempted to recapture that air of mystery, filming surreptitiously under the title The Woods to avoid attention during production. But for media- savvy audiences raised on a diet of Paranormal Activity, [Rec], The Last Exorcism, The Visit et al (plus countless sequels, prequels, spin- offs, and remakes) the film’s home- made aesthetic is just business as usual. In an age in which faux found footage fools no one, the question is not “Is it real?” but rather “What’s the point?” ‘Too often, it just looks like conventional drama’: James Allen Mc. Cune as James, brother of Heather from the original The Blair Witch Project. Photograph: Chris Helcermanas- Benge. Wingard and writer Simon Barrett, who proved their genre- literate mettle with You’re Next and The Guest, are clearly fans of Myrick and Sánchez (who take executive producer credits), and pay respectful homage to their original signature tropes – stick- men figures, stone piles, the Hansel and Gretel house etc – while updating their “just keep filming” framework. In particular, Wingard wanted to retain the urgent shaky- cam effect of The Blair Witch Project but “make it easier on the eyes”, and his clearer- than- before digital images do just that. Yet with its deftly spliced master shots, closeups, reverses and aerial views, the new film is in danger of making us forget that it’s meant to be found footage in the first place. Too often it just looks like conventional drama. With convention comes artifice. The cast may be more professional than their first- timer forebears, but they also appear to be acting throughout, particularly in scenes that involve the clunky exposition of franchise- building backstory. Gone is the palpable terror of the original trio, who were genuinely terrified by the unexpected setups into which Myrick and Sánchez lured them. They may not have been great actors, but they didn’t need to be. That was the point. More explicit revelation is a problem too, with some twiggy sub- Evil Dead body horror merely cranking up the yuck factor, while umpteen amplified jump- scares (the multi- layered soundtrack positively booms throughout) smack of cattle- prod laziness. On the plus side, there’s a Shirley Jackson- inflected elegance to the cyclical narrative, which lifts Blair Witch above the cliches of this year’s The Forest (with which it bears unfortunate comparison) while a sequence that riffs on the claustrophobia of The Descent and The Borderlands is executed in suffocating fashion. Unlike 2. 00. 0’s unloved Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (which is ignored), the solid but unsurprising result seems destined for crowd- pleasing multiplex success, efficient if unadventurous. A hundred years ago, cinema audiences ran away from an approaching train. Today, we just jump on it. All aboard. Blair Witch trailer: watch first footage from the surprise sequel – video.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
November 2017
Categories |