I really wanted to watch The Blair Witch Project this past weekend. My husband and I were in a yurt (look it up) in the woods of Virginia. We were taking a short weekend away for ourselves before the end of the semester got crazy. We had just solved a murder mystery from Hunt A Killer. It was the perfect setting to watch this classic, scary movie. The spooooooky mood was right for the taking. We were just finishing up a Piston’s game. Well, Chad was. I was tuning in and out of it while watching K-Pop videos on YouTube. And then, the lights went out.
“Yep.” I thought. “This is how we die.” Mind you, we hadn’t even watched the Blair Witch Project yet. I had just brought it up. And now we were sitting in the middle of the woods inside basically a tent/cabin in the pitch black. Luckily, after some discussion of how charged our phones were and who we should call, the lights came back on. We decided to forgo one of the scariest movies of all time that hit a little too close to our present situation and opt for the terrible yet enjoyable Anaconda.
The next morning on a walk we started talking about watching The Blair Witch Project that night and reminisced on the last time we watched a scary movie. That had been a letdown. It was The Curse of La Llorona in The Conjuring’s extended universe. The shortcomings of that movie aside, Chad and I began to discuss the shortcomings of attempting to do an extended horror-verse. Even when movies are good as the two Conjuring sequels had been, strong in both acting and script which had some good scary moments, nothing ever hits quite like The Conjuring. Mind you, I spent the better part of the night after watching that movie walking around with a knife and salt… To ward off the demons, you know?
Anyway, the novelty of the first movie lies within the unknown. Once we start to see more of Loraine and Ed’s journey, we know that they have the tools to deal with whatever possession, haunting, or demon curse is the central point of the movie. Hell, they’ve done it before. We know they can do it again. The knowing removes the bone-chilling wrongness that we often feel in horror films. I would argue that the fear of the unknown and what is to come is central to a lot of well-known and well-received horror films like Psycho, Paranormal Activity, The Conjuring, Insidious, and The Exorcist. Or, The Thing, where the name implies the lack of knowledge against the creature that terrorizes Kurt Russell and his crew in Antarctica. Creating sequels and an extended universe makes hauntings, demons, and ghosts too normalized to really recreate the horror impact of the first films. Though the atmosphere and camera work of the second Conjuring movie did come close, it didn’t reach the level of the first movie. It doesn’t invoke the same amount of fear and terror in the same manner.
We didn’t end up watching The Blair Witch Project that night either. It was too late and we had an early morning. And, I guess, I was still a little wary of what could be in the woods that night…