Almost a quarter of a century on from its release, and it remains hard to overstate just how seminal a movie The Blair Witch Project turned out to be, and it also tends to be something the newer generations can’t quite seem to comprehend in an age of social media, spoilers, and marketing saturation.
One of the most profitable films in history that weaponized viral marketing so ingeniously that it’s not out of the question to call it one of the most influential features there’s ever been, the found footage classic earned almost $250 million at the box office and ended up casting a massive shadow over not just horror, but the entirety of cinema.
And yet, despite being a one-trick pony, it was inevitably franchised into the ground. Nauseatingly self-aware sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was just awful, and Adam Wingard’s legacy follow-up Blair Witch wasn’t much better, and that’s without even mentioning the raft of mockumentaries that numbered Curse of the Blair Witch, Sticks and Stones: An Exploration of the Blair Witch Legend, The Massacre of The Burkittsville 7: The Blair Witch Legacy, and Shadow of the Blair Witch, never mind the young adult Blair Witch Files or various comic books.
Flogging a dead horse doesn’t even begin to cover it, and yet co-creator Eduardo Sánchez admitted on the Cult FM podcast that he still harbors dreams of multiple prequels, even though Lionsgate pulled the plug on the first one that didn’t happen.
“Lionsgate paid us and it was a legit, ‘We’re gonna let you guys write a script.’ We were really proud of the script and Lionsgate really did love the script, they just didn’t want to spend – it was a little bit too expensive for them to pull the trigger on it. I understand why they hesitated. That was the original idea for the Blair Witch movies, we wanted to bounce around in time. If we had been able to do it, we would have gone back and done the Elly Kedward story, which was the original Blair Witch, which would have had a lot of Native influence, at least a few Native American characters. Then we wanted to go and do a Rustin Parr story. We wanted to do these period piece horror movies, then eventually go into a sequel, six years down the road or ten years down the road. But unfortunately, it just didn’t work out for us to do it.”
Does the world need more Blair Witch? No, it does not. Thankfully, the original’s legacy has long since been secured, because some reputations simply can’t be tarnished no matter what comes next.