Not another Blair Witch reboot

The Blair Witch Project is a once-in-a-lifetime film. It’s the type of low-budget horror movie, like Evil Dead and Night Of The Living Dead, that not only inspires a generation of creative, passionate, and hardworking filmmakers but also a generation of Hollywood executives attempting to turn them into cinematic universes. Since Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project became one of the most profitable films of all time in 1999, attempts at continuing the Blair Witch saga have been top of mind for horror studios. And just like a rag-tag trip of twentysomethings hoping to debunk a folktale about a child-killing crone, Lionsgate is heading back to Blair, Maryland.

Eight years removed from Adam Wingard’s 2016 reboot, Lionsgate and Blumhouse are once again placing some sticks outside of tents. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Lionsgate and Blumhouse have signed a multi-film deal to pilfer the Lionsgate vault and “reimagine” some of their horror movies. This will begin with Blair Witch, bumping the 1999 original’s forgotten sequel tally to three.

Of course, there are a lot of variables here. Will this be a found footage movie like the original, a straightforward narrative film like Book Of Shadows, or a mixture of the two, like 2016’s reboot? Maybe it’ll be a video game like the video game. If there was ever a movie that required a video game adaptation, it’s The Blair Witch Project, a $35,000 cheapie about a trio of college kids arguing about some logs that convinced a nation that a malevolent witch spirit haunted the Maryland woods. To be clear, there is still only one good Blair Witch spin-off, and it’s Curse Of The Blair Witch, a SyFy original movie from a time when it was called the Sci-Fi Channel. That’s the movie that actually convinced people Blair Witch Project was a found document, making it even funnier that anyone ever believed it.