Snark, Critic and Pop!

The makers of 1999’s bizarrely popular, original “found footage” film, Blair Witch Project, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, want to do Blair Witch 3.  I never understood the Blair Witch phenomenon personally.  I saw the first 15 minutes before I quit, and it struck me as one step above America’s Saddest Home Video.  In fairness, I saw it on DVD, and the film may have been more effective as a theater experience.  I personally knew one woman who couldn’t sleep without nightmares for days after watching the original.

(I hear some of you saying “Blair Witch 3?”  For those who don’t remember, there actually was a sequel, Book Shadows: Blair Witch Project 2.  It wasn’t even one of those cheap-o, direct to video sequels, it was an actual, honest-to-goodness, widely released and heavily promoted movie that bombed big time.)

Myrick and Sanchez haven’t done much of anything since BWP 1, just some straight to obscurity movies like Solstice, the Believers, and the Strand (presumably about a killer strand of clothing clinging to a cursed sweater).  No wonder they want to revisit Blair Witch – to get work.  The article states:

We’ve been ready to do a ‘Blair Witch’ movie for a long time. We’re as close as we’ve ever been to making it happen but it’s still not a guaranteed thing. I actually liked the sequel but at the same time it exists in a world outside of the movie. So if we want to do a sequel to ‘Blair Witch Project,’ we have to stay in that world, which ‘Book of Shadows’ didn’t stay in that world. ‘Book of Shadows’ created a different world. It’s like if the sequel to ‘Jaws’ started with shots of people lined up to see ‘Jaws’ in the movie theater. For ‘Book of Shadows’ it worked in a certain way but to me my biggest gripe with Artisan was you shouldn’t have called it ‘Blair Witch 2.’ It would’ve been fine to call it Blair Witch Chronicles. It wasn’t really a sequel to our movie. So it would be a direct sequel to our film living in that mythology of Burkittsville, being possessed, haunted by something. Right now, the idea has no first person in it at all, but we’ll see. There’s always room for new ideas to come in. The plan is to have them [original castmembers Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams] back. They’re probably not going to be the main characters but they’re definitely characters in the sequel.”