Blair Witch is nothing you haven’t seen before

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

So it goes for writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard, who, with Blair Witch, have set out to expand the universe of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project and reboot its franchise potential.

Seventeen years ago, the original $60,000 film, by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, shocked audiences and box offices alike, grossing almost $250 million and kicking off a new horror subgenre: “found footage.” The actors had camped in the woods, filmed themselves on handheld camcorders, and improvised most of the dialogue in the movie based on sometimes-conflicting messages secreted them from the directors.

The abysmal Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which ignored the POV-camera conceit completely and was rushed into development the following year, killed any hope for a bankable ongoing series.

Of course, there’s nothing that can’t be revived these days, given enough time, so now come Barrett and Wingard — the formidable team behind You’re Next and The Guest, two of the smartest and most entertaining horror-suspense movies of the past four years. And they faced some pretty major questions: found footage or not? remake or reboot? rehash the plot or devise something new?

Ultimately, they’ve gone the J.J. Abrams all-of-the-above route — adding to and expanding the universe, referencing and recycling the plot, and updating the technology (to include drones, head-clip cameras and minimal CGI flourishes) while retaining the lived-in feel of the original. The movie even opens with similar opening text about the footage being found (this time in 2014).

This may have been the shrewdest strategy to reach both old fans and newcomers, but even with all the expert sound design and filmmaking energy on display, Blair Witch still feels like more of the same.

The story is again simple: James Donahue (James Allen McCune), kid brother of Heather, who disappeared in Maryland’s Black Hills Forest 22 years earlier, ventures into the same woods with his college-age friends and a metric crap-ton of new recording equipment (and a ton of battery power) to find out what happened to her. This lets Wingard ape the same found-footage rules from 1999, this time with way more camera sources, and displaying more editing technique. There’s rarely a shot from an omniscient POV, but he sneaks a few in, allowing a greater sense of time and place. Because of this, Blair Witch moves faster, more efficiently, and with a wider variety of shots than the original.

But what made The Blair Witch Project so thrilling was that it was also frustrating as hell. Heather and her fellow campers would frequently look directly into the camera, obscuring the view almost entirely. When something scary was happening, it was always outside the frame. Even when the trio argued in the same scene, the cameras would be pointed at the floor. It looked terrible (hence more “realistic”) and relied on the viewer’s sense of immediacy and imagination. Because he shows more, Wingard has to work harder for suspense.

As in Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Barrett’s film recycles plot points and story beats almost exactly, while adding fresh complications, red herrings and slivers of new information to the Blair Witch legend. Unfortunately, many of these new ideas are left unexplored, presumably as teasers for a possible sequel, so the payoff is pretty thin.

Wingard and Barrett clearly have respect for how innovative The Blair Witch Project was in terms of storytelling. But that doesn’t erase the 17 years in between, during which countless horror films (the [Rec] series, the Paranormal Activity series and Cloverfield, for example) have mined similar territory. Rather than abandoning the style and form that made the 1999 movie a game-changer, the duo have updated the tech and paid slavish tribute to the original. But lightning doesn’t strike twice in movies, and, paradoxically, the best audience this Blair Witch can hope for is one that its predecessor ensured doesn’t exist anymore: people who have never seen a found-footage horror flick.