Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a little chat I did yesterday with the creative team behind the Blair Witch, Mr. Adam Wingard and Mr. Simon Barrett of You're Next and The Guest fame.
After seeing the movie, I knew I wanted the focus of this chat to be how they built on the mythology of the original Blair Witch Project. Their film is at its strongest when playing around with the imagery and expectations of the original movie. The additions to the spooky supernatural stuff really help keep the movie rushing forward towards a truly tense third act.
The night before this interview I was drafted to introduce Simon and Adam for the Alamo Drafthouse's livestream event. Tim League was there to do the Q&A after the movie (thank God), but I got to set the tone for the Austin crowd and the 14 other theaters watching around the country. That's how the chat starts, with some Drafthouse and crowd talk (plus some waiter appreciation), and then we move onto Blair Witch good stuffs. Make sure to keep an eye out for Barrett's out of left field pitch of a Picnic at Hanging Rock sequel!
Enjoy!
Simon Barrett: Thank you for last night. It was awesome.
Quint: Yeah, no problem. I'm glad you guys stayed to watch the movie. It was a good crowd.
Simon Barrett: We were worried because it felt a little quiet to us until the end, but I remembered that the Drafthouse is so spacious.
Adam Wingard: It's different, too, coming off of Midnight Madness in Toronto where people just lose their minds over just about everything and it's a 1200 seat capacity.
Simon Barrett: I sat down next to a young woman and I was like “Oh, boy. I hope she gets scared,” but she was having issues with her server, debating her bill.
Quint: Yeah, I noticed the bills all dropped right when they get to the house.
Simon Barrett: Yeah. Right in the biggest scare sequences the servers came and gave everyone their change. It's just one of those Drafthouse magic things that sometimes happens.
Quint: William Friedkin came in many years ago and showed The Hunted...
Adam Wingard: I like that movie!
Quint: Yeah, me too! It was interesting because he didn't like the concept of food service during the movie and couldn't understand how it wouldn't be distracting. If my memory is right he asked for all food service to be ended in the first act before he'd OK the screening.
Simon Barrett: I was thinking about this last night... The Drafthouse servers have such a hard job.
Adam Wingard: They are like ninjas. It's impressive. I'm sitting there watching them go through any time I've been here and I'm like “Wow, how do they actually keep up with all this and stay as discreet as they do?”
Simon Barrett: They're doing everything a traditional restaurant server does, including having to deal with the bullshit public who are rude and probably making ignorant requests, and they're doing it in the dark.
Adam Wingard: With a really loud soundtrack playing.
Simon Barrett: And people drunkenly scrawling insane requests. “Two pints of ale, no gluten.” I always try to tip them crazy amounts because I can't believe how good they are at their jobs.
Quint: My brother works at an Alamo, so you'll be his favorite person in the world for saying that.
Simon Barrett: Tony?
Quint: Yep.
Simon Barrett: Heck yeah, I know him. Good kid.
Quint: We could bullshit about the Alamo for the whole interview, and it'd probably be a more fun conversation for you guys since you've been talking about your movie nonstop since Comic-Con, but we should probably get into Blair Witch...
Simon Barrett: That's generally how to get good results from us, just bring up some nonsense stuff.
Quint: I definitely want to get into how you guys expanded upon the mythology. Stuff like what you do with the stick figures and the specifics on how the Blair woman was killed and how that impacts the design in the quick moments that you glimpse the witch... To me, that sounds like it would be the most fun stuff to play around with when approaching this project.
Simon Barrett: It was. It was the fun thing. As serious fans of the original film, and by serious I mean that Adam and I didn't just like the original film, but we read the ancillary materials like the Blair Witch Dossier and watched Curse of the Blair Witch, the TV documentaries and so on, we knew all this stuff going in, without having to research everything, even before Lionsgate mentioned the project to us.
It was really all about the legends that had stayed in my brain after all these years and finding a way to... I almost want to say pay those off, but without overly explaining everything because part of what makes the original Blair Witch Project and its mythology so great is that element of mystery, which not only scares you in the theater, but can scare you months later when you happen to think about it. They're such creepy ideas and they stimulate your imagination.
We didn't want to spoil that. We didn't want to do the Star Wars prequels thing where you watch it and you're like “Well, that's pretty much what I assumed happened with Darth Vader, but I guess I figured it'd be cooler...” We didn't want to totally answer people's questions in a way that was less scary than what they had in their heads to begin with because it's pretty hard to compete with someone's imagination.
Adam Wingard: It was more about trying to put more theories out there and move it forward. One of the cool things, I think, about the original film is how the vagueness of some of the things in it provoke the imagination so much. Even though ours is much more of an in-your-face rollercoaster ride version of a movie that takes place within that worlds, it was still very important to retain that vitality in terms of the mystery the original film had.
I remember going on message boards whenever the first film came out. I got into all the materials they put out there, but the real fun thing was reading people's theories about the original film. One of the most interesting things I remember, and this is a good example of how people's imagination would run wild with this film, was one person had freeze framed a moment in the film where Heather finds the teeth wrapped up in the thing. Just in that shot, and I think it's the only time in the film, you can clearly see Heather's hands and in that shot she has a pentagram ring on. Somebody came up with this whole theory that maybe Heather was some sort of practicing Wiccan or at least into some magic and maybe part of the reason she wanted to go out there was she wanted to try some sort of conjuring spell or something. Maybe off-screen that first night she snuck out of her tent and did something and accidentally conjured something in the woods and that's why it actually started again.
That kind of stuff is really cool, I think. The fact that someone can read that kind of stuff into the movie. That was ahead of its time. Nowadays the internet is so filled with fan theories like “oh, the good guy's actually the bad guy!” You always read it and you're kind of disappointed because it's really forced, but in a lot of ways The Blair Witch Project is the genesis of a lot of internet phenomena. The concept of fan theories almost starts there.
Adam Wingard: We tried to add a bunch of new things, new seeds of things, in our film, some of which I don't think anyone has really picked up on yet, which is fine. We designed this to reward the experience of repeat viewings. I actually know people who have already seen it more than once. Hopefully they are enjoying it and discovering new things.
But if you look at what we did, we basically took everything that iconic about the original Blair Witch Project and use it to do something scary, made it a horror set piece. It wasn't about explaining things like Rustin Parr, Eileen Treacle, Elly Kedward, the sticks, the stones, facing the corner. It was about using those things and creating a horror thrill ride.
Obviously we couldn't do what the original film did again. We couldn't just do an experimental, improvisational, ambiguous film. Maybe we'll do that with our Picnic at Hanging Rock sequel... that one's really going to make critics mad, let me tell you! (laughs)
Quint: Are you going to call that sequel Book of Shadows as an homage?
Simon Barrett: (laughs) The cast will be made up entirely of the cast from Pretty Little Liars. We've got some plans for it. It's going to be pretty great. No subtlety, though. The rock is a monster. It's a CG rock monster in our Picnic at Hanging Rock sequel. But what was I talking about? Oh yeah, Blair Witch Project!
It's about using all those ideas to create a horror set piece that would pay off in some way because that to me is what's fun as a fan of horror. It's not having ideas explained to me in a way that I'm like “Yeah, duh. I either knew that or I didn't want to know that.” Something about seeing something scary that takes it a little further. That was a tricky line and I think my first draft really erred too much on the side of not enough subtlety. That draft was much more gruesome, much more gory because I think we were very much still in a VHS kind of world in our approach to horror, but fortunately or unfortunately Adam and I had 3 years to kind of work on that process and I think we came up with a balance we think people will enjoy.
Quint: You do something interesting with time in this film.
Simon Barrett: You mean how we spent 3 ½ years of our lives making a Blair Witch sequel and we're much, much older now?
Quint: (laughs) Yes, that, too. The original played with time a bit, too, but you guys take it a step further. I like how after the first night the concept of time goes out the window and can mean different things for different people. Without getting into too many spoilers there's something that happens at the end that impact the beginning of the film, for instance.
Simon Barrett: There's a time loop that's implicit in the original Blair Witch Project. They certainly don't make it obvious, but you do get the sense that the characters are out of time and space. Once they're trapped in the woods and they find out they've been hiking in a circle... and the house, Rustin Parr's house appearing at the end, they do imply that just kind of appeared.
Adam Wingard: If you go and read the backstories that house was burned down, so it's impossible it to be there altogether.
Simon Barrett: The real answer is actually pretty short. The real reason why I came up with the time loop stuff and expanded on it was knowing that it's almost impossible to do anything scary in the woods during the daytime. I wanted to minimize all the scenes that took place in the daytime and couldn't figure out a way to do that. Then I was like, “Oh, yeah. It's a Blair Witch movie. What if it just stops being daytime? We can totally do that!” It's a creepy idea. What if you look at your watch and it's 10am and it's pitch black outside?
Adam Wingard: It's a different pacing than the original film. The original feels like it takes place over quite a few days. Ours only takes place over two nights, even though it feels like they're out there longer. A lot of things happen in over 2 nights, so ours feels a little closer to real time compared to the original and having the endless nights made it feel longer.
It also adds to the claustrophobia, I feel. We literally go into a claustrophobic moment inside the house, in the tunnel, but I think one of the coolest things about the original film is when you realize you're caught in a time loop and can't get out you become claustrophobic even in a big environment.
I've actually been lost in the woods for a very brief amount of time when I was younger. Me and my friend were hiking. I think we were in 3rd or 4th Grade and we hiked out to this tree stand that his dad had and when we were going back to our house we decided to take a different route, foolishly. We were only lost for maybe 30 minutes, but it was horrifying because as you are going through the woods you start getting more and more panicked. You start hallucinating that there's a trail up ahead, so you run faster towards it but when you get closer you realize it's just more woods. Then the panic gets more and more real, more intense and you work yourself up more. It is a horrifying, claustrophobic feeling even though you're in a wide open space.
Many thanks to Fons PR for setting all this up and to Adam and Simon for getting geeky with me, both in this interview and during the big intro the night before. Blair Witch is out now, so get thee hence to the theater!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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