For a lot of people, Blair Witch Project was one of their earliest experiences with the horror genre.
Almost seventeen years since its initial release, it still has a huge amount of resonance and is still pretty effective - even if there's been countless rip-offs and homages to it since then. Found-footage horror, in fact, got something of a boost thanks to Blair Witch Project.
After all, without it, we wouldn't have the likes of Cloverfield or Chronicle. But then, again, we wouldn't have the endless amount of crap found-footage horror films either.
Anyway, Adam Wingard - who directed 2014's fantastic The Guest - has been working away on a new horror film since the beginning of the year and had released posters, trailers and so forth for it. The Woods, as it was known, was revealed yesterday night at San Diego Comic-Con as actually being a direct sequel to 1999's Blair Witch Project.
Take a look.
It's interesting to see how studios are really using the idea of misdirection to market films. You'll recall how 10 Cloverfield Lane wasn't necessarily marketed as a Cloverfield sequel and, in fact, people were encouraged not to talk about the film's plot after they'd seen it.
There's a bit of similarity going on here. For one thing, The Woods was already being hyped as one of the most interesting horror films of the year - especially with Adam Wingard attached - and the sketchy details on the film had piqued some interest.
However, the reveal yesterday pretty much set old-school horror fans off in a way that hasn't been seen in quite a while. There's a huge amount of lore and backstory attached to Blair Witch and, although there was a crap sequel released for it, the original director / producer are saying that this is the true sequel to Blair Witch Project.
No Irish release date has been confirmed, but we're expecting it to be sometime around the end of 2016.
