Blair Witch v. Blair Witch
Horror trailers and the art of deception.
I’m concerned that the movie system at large is lost on how to market films, and what makes us excited about them. Or at the very least, I haven’t seen a good trailer in like 11 years.
The following essay is also not meant to put down the quality of Blair Witch (it hasn’t been released yet, so that isn’t fair).
One of the things that made me think about this was the trailer of the remake/sequel of The Blair Witch Project (1999, dir. Eduardo Sánchez, Daniel Myrick), now called just Blair Witch (2016, dir. Adam Wingard). The trailer is below.
This trailer worried me for a lot of reasons, because it’s Generic Horror Thriller Scary Movie Trailer. A GHTSMT basically gives the plot/drive of a film away completely, which is a sin of most trailers nowadays to be honest. It also peppers in advance praise (which I’m pretty sure is for The Blair Witch Project, and not this film) along with showing quick shots that enunciate the special effects of the film that were not in the original (given that the original had the technological marvels of the 1990s at its disposal).
There are a lot of shots that show it to be a remake even though its “a sequel,” because there are recreations of famous shots from the original film peppered throughout. Contrast this with the trailer for The Blair Witch Project.
Not only does this trailer give nothing about the plot away other than the foregone finale, it almost reads like a Dateline-special feature trailer instead of a GHTSMT. That is precisely what made The Blair Witch Project such a unique film: it was not marketed like a film. It was marketed like a documentary gone horribly horribly wrong. The somewhat disappointing un-reveal at the end of the film is actually telegraphed in the documentary section of the film, and if the audience is paying attention, they will understand the bleak end of the characters and why the film ends the way it does. There was really not much comparable to it in American cinema before The Blair Witch Project, and definitely not in horror film.
To be fair, this resulted in the film not actually functioning well as a flat out movie, and it disappointed audiences at large for good reasons. It was meta-fiction in film form, something that I’m not sure will ever be achievable ever again because The Blair Witch Project existed in the absolute perfect time to create meta-fictional film. Meta-fiction is not a crowd pleaser. Compare Jorge Luis Borges to Stephen King by seeing who has more books in airport bookstores.
But it was important that The Blair Witch Project was meta-fiction, and that the marketing tried to create a sense that this was not a film when it was clearly still a film.
Blair Witch, in contrast, just kinda said it the title was Blair Witch and hoped that would excite people.
So now, instead of a crazy marketing campaign that weirdly tried to trick millions of people into thinking actual people were killed by a fictional witch, we get a trailer that shows a bunch of people running around in the woods because something spooky is happening and spooky thing no. 659,765 is The Blair Witch and not some Off-Brand Witch.
Look, at least there was some effort in the first attempt, not just a trailer and a verified Twitter account.
This is not to say I could be wrong about the film’s quality. Sometimes, in a rare blue moon, trailers are (intentionally or unintentionally) misleading for the benefit/surprise of the film. Take Crimson Peak (2015, dir. Guillermo del Toro) for example:
Seems like a standard ghost movie with period dressing.
Except it’s actually a Gothic horror film with a special guest appearance from ghosts. It has very noticeable literary roots to it that give the film a good amount of depth and mythology, and the ghosts are almost secondary to the period itself.
It was probably just easier for trailers to market it as a Generic Scary Spooky Ghost Movie (GSSGM).
Trailers mean a lot. A lot of people I talk to don’t seem to think it’s important, but for a lot of people it’s like first impressions of a movie they could spend upwards of 30 dollars upon.
An effective marketing campaign that never showed the titular Godzilla (2014, dir. Gareth Edwards) made the film extremely successful in the box office. An effective marketing campaign can give you an incredible opening weekend.
Right now, Blair Witch just feels like every other found footage horror movie I’ve seen since The Blair Witch Project.
