The Blair Witch Is Back!

Simon Barrett. Image by Alex Themistocleous

It’s been 17 years since audiences were first horrified by the mysterious disappearance of Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard and Mike Williams, the three student filmmakers who ventured into a Burkittsville, Maryland forest in 1994, never to return. The “footage” they left behind turned a genre upside down and set a moviemaking trend for years to come.

The Blair Witch Project startled horror fans everywhere with something that had never been seen before. The villain was presented as a true legend and the story as a true case of missing persons…and people didn’t know what to think.

But they were fascinated. The truth about its fiction obviously came out, but the made-up mythology grew and found footage films became the next big thing. And simple as it may be – there is no gore, no sound effects and only a handful of jump scares – The Blair Witch Project still holds up after all this time as a scary movie.

Heather Donahue in The Blair Witch Project (1999) Photo by Artisan Entertainment - © 1999 Artisan Entertainment

So when a major studio calls in two horror filmmakers for a secret meeting years later and tells them they want to resurrect the brand, the answer was obvious. Fortunately for screenwriter Simon Barrett, he and longtime directing collaborator Adam Wingard (You’re Next, The Guest) were already fans of the original and more than excited to accept Lionsgate’s offer.

But they had to keep it under wraps, and for a very long time. The project was initially dubbed “The Woods” and Barrett had to write multiple versions of the script for actors to read from while auditioning for the roles. Only once they were cast were the chosen few let into the inner circle.

Now the film is finally being released and the cast and crew are able to discuss it openly. Creative Screenwriting had the opportunity to sit down with Barrett at the Toronto International Film Festival to talk about the experience of writing a sequel to a groundbreaking film years after the fact, and make it appealing to both longtime fans as well as a new generation of horror-lovers.

Valorie Curry in Blair Witch © 2016 - Lionsgate

Tell me about how your involvement with this project first began.

Lionsgate had bought You’re Next, a film that I did with Adam back in 2011. It took a while for that film to come out because they had some corporate change-ups. But the two of us got called in for a top-secret meeting. We didn’t know what it was about, although we had our theories.

They (executive producers Jason Constantine and Eda Kowan, who had bought You’re Next) had been talking to our producers, Steve Schneider and Roy Lee, about resurrecting The Blair Witch Project. They owned it, and we had no idea. I knew they had acquired Artisan, but I guess I assumed the rights had expired – it turned out they hadn’t.

We thought it might be Saw or something along those lines. They presented it to us, and because we were fans and already friends with a couple of the original filmmakers (we worked with Gregg Hale and Eduardo Sanchez on V/H/S/2), we were very excited.

We thought “Absolutely – no one else should do this other than us”. I think we were the first filmmakers they talked to about it. They offered it to us first and we took it.

Sharni Vinsion as Erin in You’re Next © 2013 - Lionsgate

The original was groundbreaking and set a trend for many films to follow. Did you have any anxiety about taking on a project with that kind of cult status or was it pure excitement?

There was some anxiety. Something that’s interesting to think about is that if there had only been the original film and none of its ancillary materials had ever come out – including Book of Shadows, the rushed sequel they put out in 2000 – it might have been a different conversation for us. Whether you like Book of Shadows or not, it’s a departure from the original mythology and is kind of a 90-degree turn. And that’s where it ended. They didn’t make any more films after that and they were done.

Because of that, it was less intimidating than it would have been otherwise. If there had only been the original film, I don’t know if I would have said yes to this project, honestly.

I might have said “You know what, it’s perfect on its own”. But because as a fan in 1999 I saw The Blair Witch Project in theatres and then in 2000 I saw Book of Shadows in theatres, I had always had this idea in my head of wishing there had been a more direct sequel to the original.

And while on some level it is intimidating of course, trying to create a sequel to a modern horror classic, I felt that I had the right instincts – because as a fan, I knew what I wanted from that sequel.

Some people are going to like our film more, some people are going to like our film less – that’s the way it is. But for me it was really about trying to find the right creative approach and I felt guided by my love of the material. Not just my love of the original film, but of all of the mythology and the universe they created – which the existing sequel hadn’t explored any further.

It was intimidating. I knew that if I failed, I’d be doing so very publicly – because this was the first time that Adam and I were making a studio movie and that we were working with a very well-known brand – but at the same time it had been dormant for a decade and a half. So I felt confident in my abilities to do a good job, based on that.

It’s not for me to say whether I succeeded, but I felt like I had the right goals in mind when I was working on it.

James Allen McCune in Blair Witch. Photo by Chris Helcermanas-Benge - © 2016 - Lionsgate

Tell me about the research you did. It’s one thing to research traditional lore, is it another to find usable material on a completely fabricated mythology?

It’s tricky because I didn’t want to be too hamstrung by my research. I had the blessing of Eduardo Sanchez, Dan Myrick and Gregg Hale to do whatever I wanted with the mythology. Which is fantastic, and part of that was again because we had a pre-existing friendship based on working together on V/H/S/2.

But also I think they just understood that that’s the right way to make a sequel. If I had just slavishly followed what the original film did then there’s no point in making a sequel because the original film exists already.

So I had the freedom to get pretty loose with the mythology. However, I myself wanted to be very respectful. There’s such a wealth of Blair Witch materials out there and some are very unusual, such as the young adult novels by Cade Merrill, of which there are eight. So it was a matter of choosing then what was canon or not.

I knew I didn’t want to reference anything in our film that wasn’t in the first film itself – you can’t just reference things and say “go track this book down on eBay”. I wanted our film to be a true sequel and a true companion piece to the original film. That was the goal from the start and what Lionsgate wanted. That meant not referencing any mythology – in my opinion – that was outside of the original film. It was more about extrapolating upon and advancing and finding new and interesting things to do with it.

I did change some things, of course…but it was all about making sure that anything I put in our film, you could go back and watch the original and it would tie in.

Callie Hernandez as Lisa in Blair Witch. Photo by Chris Helcermanas-Benge - © 2016 - Lionsgate

In addition to that, I decided to treat as canon any of the ancillary materials that had the direct involvement of the original filmmakers, including production designer Ben Rock. That was the made-for-TV documentaries Curse of the Blair Witch, Shadow of the Blair Witch and The Burkittsville 7, as well as the Blair Witch dossier, especially by Dave Stern (writing as D.A. Stern).

It’s an incredibly helpful tool. How many screenwriters have the opportunity to write a sequel where there actually are research manuals out there? I mean, I guess if you’re doing Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings or something, there are histories of those mythologies. But really for horror, there isn’t a lot.

There is in the case of Blair Witch, because it was presented as real and as a real history. So there are fake historical documents that allow you to actually research a fake mythology, like you said.

Corbin Reid as Ashley in Blair Witch. Photo by Chris Helcermanas-Benge - © 2016 - Lionsgate

How did you tread the line of paying tribute to the original while updating it enough for perhaps a very different modern-day horror audience?

That was the real challenge of writing this film. On one hand, I wanted to write something that diehard fans of the original film would love. But on the other hand, I wanted to write something that the younger audience who had never seen – or perhaps even heard of – the first film would also love.

I wanted to write something that felt completely authentic in the same way that the first film did, so that we could have that suspension of disbelief for our viewers where they could pretend that it was real. But at the same time I wasn’t doing a total improvisational experiment like the first film.

I was writing a script that was supposed to be a fairly tightly constructed thrill ride, building to a big climax. In other words, I wanted that tight pacing and all those thrills in a fairly fast-paced narrative – but I still also wanted the looseness and improvisational feeling and realness of the original.

So that was the challenge. How did I do it? I tried a bunch of little tricks. First of all, I tried to make the dialogue as natural as possible, with little overlapping dialogue bits. The actors were encouraged to do some improv on set, but usually I’d give them something to riff on.

Then I would also tend to write longer versions of scenes than I knew we were going to use. I think the script was 128 pages and the movie is 89 minutes long – that was intentional. We didn’t cut any scenes, really. But what I would do is I’d script the longer version of a scene and we would just use the middle section.

Now that’s not true once we get into the really scary stuff. But the dialogue and expository scenes were designed to feel like you could just cut to any moment of them. You could pick an editing in-point and an editing out-point and just splice a little bit of it – and it would still have that realistic feeling while nonetheless providing you with the actual scripted information that I needed to get across.

Callie Hernandez as Lisa in Blair Witch © 2016 - Lionsgate

Horror can be a temperamental genre. What do you enjoy about writing it?

I like to be surprised by movies, as a fan. My favorite thing about films is if they do something that surprises me. I feel like horror is a great genre to really do something new and innovative that people haven’t seen before. As long as it’s scary and fun, audiences will be on board for some really avant-garde choices, at least in theory.

When I was a kid I loved horror, just because it was fun and you always knew something was going to happen in a horror movie. And if it’s bad, then it’s funny – whereas a bad comedy is just tedious and excruciating. But a bad horror movie is hilarious!

So as I kid I loved it because I knew it would deliver on something in terms of entertainment. And as an adult, it’s possible that I love it for the same reasons. I’m just more into the thematic and stylistic innovations you can make while still working within the parameters of a genre that has a built-in fanbase.

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