Glitches were added to help the story feel more real, while additional footage was inter-spliced here and there to deliberately throw us off. Hundreds of takes were captured, to ensure the actor and camera were always in concert with each other. The sonic identities of the different cameras were very important. Wes Robinson, who plays Lane, even shot most of his footage for real on the older Sony video-camera featured in the movie. They stood behind the camera operators for that found footage effect during filming, and wore massive rigs on their heads whenever they were in the shot. The lesser-known cast of actors were given only “safe scripts” to read and weren’t even told what they were auditioning for at first. Blair Witch is an incredibly tactile movie, with Wingard adamant everything was done in camera, practically. Working as both sound designer and composer, Wingard created soundscapes to layer in as the subtle, barely-there score, playing with a lot of real noises to give that genuine, trapped-in-the-forest feel.
As Wingard notes, “What really makes it scary is you don’t know what’s out there.” Everything is based on the core lore and mythology established in The Blair Witch Project, with the two making it clear that, although they didn’t want to show absolutely nothing again, what we do see definitely is not the witch. They wanted to make a “relentless” and “pure” horror movie, building an impressive, 3-storey set for the house where much of the brilliant final act takes place, similar to the original film, even making holes to match those glimpsed in its predecessor.
It’s worth noting, too, that Wingard and Barrett were the first choices of the original filmmakers to handle such delicate material.
The documentary accompanying the BD release of the movie showcases, to an almost painful extent, just how much work these two put into their Blair Witch. Wingard has since fought even harder battles with his re-imagining of the beloved Death Note (which wasn’t terrible by any stretch of the imagination) but it’s clear this one was intensely personal to him and Barrett.
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