It was a movie phenomenon like no other. In 1999, The Blair Witch Project crept into cinemas across the world and quickly grew from a no-budget horror to a $250 million-grossing success; setting the trend for ‘found-footage’ movies and re-inventing the horror film in the process.

Its innovative approach to story-telling and the raw authenticity with which it was told sparked audiences’ imagination, drawing new fans to the genre. Its ostensibly benign forest setting was soon to become a terrain of terror as three students – Heather, Mike and Joshua – set up camp within the Black Hills Forest in Maryland to investigate the legend of the Blair Witch… never to be heard from again, leaving a trail of theories and suspicions in their wake.

Director Adam Wingard and long-time collaborator, screenwriter Simon Barrett have been tasked with finally bringing the sequel, titled simply Blair Witch, to the screen.

“When it first came out, I was one of a billion high school kids taking a camcorder into the woods and doing a Blair Witch spoof with my friends,” says Wingard. “The film had a total dedication toward authenticity. No one has so completely committed to that type of realism before or since. Simon and I re-watched the film half a dozen times during pre-production to consider every option when creating our story, and were we were astounded by how well it held up – not just as a found footage movie but also as a horror movie.”

For several years, Lionsgate had been searching for the right concept to reboot Blair Witch, as well as filmmakers who could satisfy the fans of the first film and reach a new generation of moviegoers. Following the success Wingard and Barrett’s previous collaborations, including You’re Next, The Guest, V/H/S and V/H/S/2, Lionsgate set up a meeting with the duo to pitch the sequel.

The film feels so authentic that at a certain point you forget that you are watching a found footage movie

“We knew that Adam and Simon had a total mastery of the horror genre and could simultaneously honour the original movie while making something completely ground-breaking and terrifying for 2016,” says Jason Constantine, Lionsgate’s President of Acquisitions and Co-Productions.

In prepping his screenplay, Barrett familiarised himself with every hint of information the first film contains, from old message boards and Facebook groups to graphic novels and young adult books published only in Europe.

“The mythology was a huge enticement for me because the first film never really explained anything,” says Barrett. “We wanted to take the mythos further and explore how outsiders approach the haunting and how locals see the legend.”

The story is set 20 years after the first film’s events. Heather’s brother Janes (James Allen McCune) and his friends Peter (Brandon Scott), Ashley (Corbin Reid) and film student Lisa (Callie Hernandez) venture back into the Black Hills Forest, each armed with a camera to uncover the mysteries surrounding the original trio’s disappearance.

At first the group is hopeful, especially when a pair of locals offer to act as guides through the dark and winding woods. But as the endless night wears on, the group is visited by a menacing presence. Slowly, they begin to realize the legend is all too real and more sinister than they could have imagined.

Given the film’s legacy, the plethora of ‘found-footage’ movies left in its wake, and the myriad exceptional horror films that followed, the filmmakers knew they needed to push the boundaries.

“The challenge for us was to make a modern horror movie that acknowledged and surpassed everything that’s happened in horror over the past 17 years, including films like The Conjuring, Insidious and Saw, and have the film feel as real to audiences as it did in 1999,” says Barrett.

For the filmmakers that meant including plenty of scares. “With the Blair Witch, the challenge was incorporating those scares into found footage, which is difficult because your point of view is so limited,” says Wingard. “One of the problems with found footage films is you’re hyper aware of the cameras and we wanted to make sure that was thrown out the door. The film feels so authentic that at a certain point, you forget that you’re watching a found footage movie. You absolutely buy the reality of it, so when the horror happens, you are 100 per cent invested and put in a scenario in a way you’ve never been before and completely terrorised by it.”

As terrorised as Blair Witch’s new protagonists, who are about to discover there’s something evil still hiding in the woods…

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