This topic of explaining all of the movie’s secrets is a real sticking point for Barrett. Earlier this month he tweeted, “Viewers annoyed that we didn’t overly explain every element of Blair Witch, I have great news: literally every other horror movie does this” and both he and Wingard have been bombarded with people online complaining about the movie’s ambiguity. “Everything in the original film, I tried to find a way to take further and provide answers to, but I was also always trying to hint at new things and hint at new implications, and I’m very baffled by the people who were like, ‘why didn’t you fully explain everything to us?,'” he says. “The really scary thing is that was something we had to fight for, because the studio instinct is that all horror fans are very dim people and need everything explained to them twenty times or they won’t get it. These executives were smart people, and they were down with what we wanted to do, but they were like, ‘are people going to get this? Are people going to get this ambiguity? Or are people going to want everything explained to them a million times?’. And we strongly argued that they didn’t. But a lot of people have informed me on social media that they did and they think we’re assholes.”
Which brings us round to the subject of the DVD commentary, which Barrett had previously promised would “explain a lot, but hopefully without ruining anything”. However there were some very vocal fans online that felt Barrett and Wingard didn’t fulfill that promise. “Where I said I was going to explain everything, I felt like we did,” Barrett argues. “We explained everything we set out to explain. That was the funny thing. We made a lot of jokes about how we weren’t going to explain things because no one went to go and see the movie, but we never intended to answer those questions anyway. We thought it was fairly obvious that we were kidding. But we do explain a tonne on our commentary. If you read the reaction you’d think it was thirty minutes of explaining and then just Adam and I making fun of the fans. But no, we talk the entire time and joke about one of the things we purposefully kept ambiguous.”
It all ties back into the idea The Blair Witch Project promoted: debating the ending with friends and coming up with your own conclusions and theories. “Just recently someone was yelling at me on Twitter that I didn’t explain everything and I was like, ‘do you not have your own theory on this?’ And they responded with a really well thought out answer. They were like, ‘Maybe there’s an extra-terrestrial element involved’ and all this stuff, they had a really well thought out answer. And I was like, ‘that’s correct’. I’m not saying that’s the right answer, but that was the process we were trying to encourage. You have a creative answer that’s based on the clues we gave you.”
But who really is at fault? Are fans right to complain that Blair Witch left them unsatisfied, or was Barrett right to pen a script that was purposefully ambiguous to allow discussion? Even Barrett is unsure. “I just think it’s a tricky thing because we’re dealing with a mythology that had a lot of books and so on, and we were laying out clues that dug into that,” he says. “But maybe it was our fault and we didn’t make a film that was good enough to make people want to dig into all that. I’m not going to blame a handful of vocal people who didn’t like the movie on social media, because you quickly realise you start engaging with people who didn’t even see the film and just figured out that if they tweet mean things at you, you tweet mean things back. That’s part of the fun being on the Internet.”
In total Blair Witch not only managed to under-perform when compared to The Blair Witch Project, but it didn’t even meet the box office standard set by the much-worse Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. But even with the bad reviews and poor box office numbers, the end of our conversation comes back to the backlash the film received from horror fans. “It’s been an illuminating process, and certainly and educational one. And I’ll own that,” Barrett concludes. “The first Blair Witch prompted people to dig deeper, and our Blair Witch has prompted people to dig deeper into the Blair Witch dossier and Curse of the Blair Witch and you can find some of the answers to the questions, but it’s also prompted a lot of people to call me an asshole on Twitter. I’m not saying I feel I’ve done anything wrong, but I’m very aware going forward I’m going to be called bad things on the Internet based on my creative choices. Maybe I’ll embrace that, I don’t know.”
Blair Witch is out now on Blu-Ray and DVD
Luke Owen is the Deputy Editor of Flickering Myth and the co-host of The Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @ThisisLukeOwen and read his weekly feature The Week in Star Wars.
