Joining James on his quest to locate his sister are his filmmaker girlfriend Lisa (Callie Hernandez), his best friend Peter (Brandon Scott) and Peter's girlfriend Ashley (Corbin Reid). Rather than going for the convenient of assembling yet another bunch of foolhardy adventurers to go back into the forest, Wingard chooses to establish a much emotional (and logical) raison d'être for flirting with danger – an online video of the house which was last seen in 'The Blair Witch Project', and a fleeting glimpse of a figure which James (James Allen McCune) believes to be that of her missing sister Heather Donahue, one of the three student filmmakers who went missing two decades ago. It would seem folly therefore for any filmmaker to attempt a sequel, let alone reboot, the original and yet, despite our initial skepticism, we were quickly won over by director Adam Wingard and his regular writing collaborator Simon Barrett's tense, gripping and even nail-biting follow-up that stays true to its predecessor while expanding on the mythology of the Blair Witch. That it eventually achieved a lifetime box-office gross of US$250 million made copycats inevitable, but no other horror film since then – aside from the first 'Paranormal Activity' – has been able to replicate its formula to the same winning effect.
Made on a micro-budget of US$60,000, it complemented its then-novel found-footage format with clever marketing which positioned the film we would see as 'recovered footage' shot by the three student filmmakers who had gone missing in the Black Hills Forest of Burkittsville, Maryland while making a documentary about a local legend known as the Blair Witch. Love it or hate it, there's no denying that 'The Blair Witch Project' was a landmark film for the horror genre in terms of technique and marketing.
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