Blair Witch Interview With Adam Wingard & Simon Barrett

The original Blair Witch Project came out of nowhere. That was the whole point, really. With a budget of $60,000, three unknown actors and one consumer video camera, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez went on to catfish the entire moviegoing public, convincing audiences that the footage of three student filmmakers terrorized by something or someone out in the Maryland woods was real “recovered footage” from a documentary gone horribly wrong.

Whether you bought it or not didn’t matter – as long as you bought a ticket – the movie was a massive hit, turning that measly budget into nearly $250 million dollars at the box office, and becoming a genuine pop culture phenomenon. It’d effectively revolutionize horror movies, inspiring a league of imitators and a whole new subgenre: the found footage movie. 

Unfortunately though, it’s a trick that really only works once. (As the guys who made the widely-panned sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 found out…) But now, 17 years later, audiences will be returning to the Black Hills forest one more time with Blair Witch, from a pair of up-and-coming genre filmmakers, director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett. (If you’ve seen You’re Next or The Guest, you already know what these guys can do.)

In keeping with tradition, this Blair Witch is still found footage – this time, from the files of a wannabe documentarian making a movie about her friend’s quest to find out what really happened to his sister Heather, one of the original Blair Witch three, all those years ago. And to preserve the element of surprise, Wingard and Barrett kept the project a closely guarded secret, first calling their kids, woods, and video cameras horror movie simply The Woods, before finally revealing it as an official Blair Witch sequel at Comic-Con earlier this summer.

But while the ghost of that original movie still hangs over this one (figuratively and literally, of course), Wingard and Barrett have managed to put their own modern spin on the franchise, tricking out their would-be filmmakers with GoPros, GPS-enabled cameras, even a drone – technology’s come a long way since 1999. And so have horror movies. But even in an era where horror fans are repeatedly terrorized by non-stop reboots, remakes and reimaginings of their favorite classics, this new Blair Witch stands out as a worthy entry in the infamous horror franchise.

With the long-awaited sequel now out, AskMen sat down with Wingard and Barrett after the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where we spoke to them about doing the Blair Witch legacy justice, along with which other horror franchises they’d never want to tackle.

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