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Movies & TV

Blair Witch directors love their secrets

Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett (director and screenwriter of A Horrible Way To Die, You’re Next and The Guest, all of which played TIFF) returned to the festival earlier this week to terrorize Midnight Madness with Blair Witch. 

This is notable for two reasons: first, the sequel to the 1999 found-footage smash was produced in secret and only revealed at Comic-Con this summer… and second, it’s really good. The day after the TIFF premiere, we talked about how both of those things came to pass.

This is a gig you have to take seriously

To make a worthy sequel to The Blair Witch Project, Wingard and Barrett knew they had to change their own game. “You know, Simon and I have been known as horror filmmakers for years, but we’ve never really made a film that was just straightforward committed to being scary,” Wingard says. “Everything we’ve done has been genre deconstructions and things like that. We’d been talking for years about how we need to try to make a real horror film, because the lazy thing for us to do would be to just do another crazy genre deconstruction film. We felt like it was time to really flex our muscles and say, ‘Let’s see if we can really scare people, like the rest of these guys.'”

They really love the mythology

“To me, Blair Witch is being lost in the woods at night with a flashlight and the sun’s not coming up and you’re hungry and your friends are gone,” Barrett says. “One of the closest films I’d compare The Blair Witch Project to is Picnic At Hanging Rock – just this idea that some places are inherently evil, and maybe we don’t know why.”

Making a found-footage movie was harder than they expected

“You have to let go of trying to make something clean and pristine,” Wingard says, explaining that he had to rethink all of his usual choices, right down to music. “There are some 20 tracks of music in The Guest, and so much of its style and tone is derived from that. Doing a film like this makes you throw all that out the door, because your commitment is to the reality of the found-footage style and you have to stay true to that.” 

Secret movies are fun…

“Adam and I don’t like to talk about our projects in advance, period,” Barrett says. “In this era of over-sharing and overhype on social media and so on, I often feel sick of movies well before they come out. I’ve just seen too much about them and I’m annoyed. I never want someone to feel that way about something we’ve done.”

… as long as you can keep them secret

The cloak of silence around Blair Witch – which was known as The Woods up until Comic-Con – was nearly shredded when the website Bloody Disgusting caught wind of the project. “Nobody believed them, fortunately,” Wingard laughs. “And we didn’t confirm or deny, and it just went away. But it was so close to coming out any second.”

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