Did you hear that there’s a new remake of The Blair Witch Project? No? Good—you weren’t supposed to. At the July premiere, the audience entered a theater plastered with posters for a movie called The Woods and emerged after the screening to see the intentionally misleading promotional materials replaced with ones bearing the real title: Blair Witch, directed by Adam Wingard (You’re Next and The Guest).
The success of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project—with its then-innovative use of amateur documentary style and psychological thrills created on a shoestring budget—is impossible to re-create, and the first attempt (Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, released just a year after the original) was a critical and commercial flop…