When is a film not a film..? Well, in the case of ‘The Woods’… it’s when it turns out the marketing has hidden one key fact… that the title is false and it’s a sequel to a horror classic.
In recent years – and with the advent of spoilers and leaks – some studios have gone a long way to hiding their plans and tweaking their marketing to surprise. Sometimes it’s denying a movie is being made, sometimes shooting under another title or simply remaining shtum about what the film will entail.
It turns out that a film The Woods, destined to debut in September won’t be doing so… because though it was filmed and marketed with that name, it will now debut as the film-makers and studio (Lionsgate) always intended as Blair Witch. As anyone who has seen The Woods trailer will probably have noted, there were some basic similarities to The Blair Witch Project… essentially young people lost in a rural environment and plagued by something supernatural. Now it’s official. It was revealed at the SDCC that The Woods / Blair Witch is a sequel to the 1999 film in which the brother of one of the original characters sets out to find out what really happened.
Horror fans loved The Blair Witch Project, which was shot as a found-footage documentary and originally marketed as possibly being real. It told how three film-makers went into local woods to try and find out more about the urban legend of the title. They begin to feel they are being watched, but the real-life directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, cleverly left most of the film very ambigious so that the sense of menace or perceived threat could be wholly imagined. It’s been labelled as one of the scariest movies ever, which might be exaggerating a little, but it does build up a sense of dread and finishes in a very memorable fashion. Some of its success was that it was so different from all the big-budget releases of the year and it ultimately inspired a lot of inferior copy-cat movies.
Whether 2016’s Blair Witch, (see its official site here….) which will get its debut at the SDCC this weekend (after still, initially, being marketed as a The Woods screening) is genuinely another horror classic in the making (‘One of the scariest movies in decades…‘ is the studio claim), or merely riding the coat-tails of the first film for a further derivative sequel (after a disappointing prequel story) only time will tell.
But here’s the trailer (as was)… it’s effective but does seem a little too familiar now the secret’s out…
and the revised version…
