The original The Blair Witch Project was a triumph of marketing as much as anything else. So consider it a tribute that The Guest director Adam Wingard pulled off a legitimately great piece of misdirection tonight, when a Comic-Con screening revealed that his previously teased backwoods monster thriller The Woods was, in fact, a sequel to the 1999 horror phenomenon, titled simply Blair Witch.
The trailer for the movie shows James Allen McCune as the supposed brother of the original movie’s ill-fated Heather, going off on his own found-footage adventure with his own crew of largely unlikable friends. (At least handheld camera technology seems to have gotten less relentlessly unpleasant in the last 17 years.) Blair Witch definitely looks more overtly supernatural than the original, what with all the barely seen creatures running around in the woods. Hopefully it’ll be able to avoid the over-the-top excess that made Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 such an inevitable disappointment.