Lionsgate blew the roof off the cinema with an unsuspecting twist on Friday at Comic-con, when they screened the entire, finished version of The Woods , in a surprise reveal: It is actually the third movie in the Blair Witch series.
Simply titled Blair Witch , the film was filmed covertly last summer. It brings an entirely new cast to the Black Hills Forest, film students chasing the legend of the witch. Most significantly, one cast member (James Allen McClure) chases the memory of his sister, who disappeared with her camera crew in these woods in Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s 1999 film.
The new film, according to the Daily Beast , is true to the original Blair Witch movie with painstaking detail, while dazzlingly frightening.
However, some of the original errors cited by Movie Mistakes in the original Blair Witch Project may also pop up in Part 3.
The biggest question is, why didn’t the lost kids simply follow the river?
Watch the Trailer for the ‘Blair Witch’ Sequel and Maybe Crap Your Pants https://t.co/IU9ZAh3qXM pic.twitter.com/rQVwD5piTu
— Cosmopolitan (@Cosmopolitan) July 24, 2016
The question is listed as a big-feature gaffe.
“Once lost in the woods, a pretty standard tactic is to follow the river: it must eventually lead out of the woods. But these ‘seasoned hikers’ seem to just keep walking aimlessly in random directions.”
These mistakes are listed on the site with corrections. Someone has pointed out that the failure of the victims to follow the river is a mistake made by the characters in the movie, not a movie mistake.
However, one would think after all these years, the new group would know better.
Still, the woods remain a villain that modern folks are no better equipped to deal with. For instance, this recent Inquisitr article tells the story of three girls who became lost on a river in Muskegon, Michigan, after they were told that it would flow in a circle and bring them back to their car.
The Muskegon girls were found about noon on the day after their tubing trip started. They were terrified. The police pointed out that they had not brought their cell phones. They were clad only in swimming suits, had not brought any food, or a hat, or any sort of protection from the elements.
‘Circular Muskegon River’ Trip Goes Awry: Panicking Tubers Lead To Hilarious Reactions https://t.co/NkNizkqmPf
— Nancy J. Bailey (@cliffysmom) July 15, 2016
The Blair Witch characters made the same mistake. The Q and A on Movie Mistakes reviews them.
“Why did the cast have the sense to pack everything for their trip in the woods, yet throughout the film, no-one bothers to include any means of communication, such as a mobile phone or more likely a pager?”
Answer:
“This is a question, not a mistake. For starters, they were students and may not necessarily have had the money to splurge on a cell phone in 1994. also, a pager wouldn’t have done them any good, as they only receive pages, they don’t send them. Finally, like so many people, the students didn’t expect to get lost in the woods, so they didn’t prepare for every contingency. Not very smart (just as not bringing a weapon is arguably unwise) but not a mistake.”
Movie Mistakes also point out that people who are lost often move in a circle, so scenes that look the same might just mean the characters are stumbling around on the same path, which is common even for experienced hikers with no compass.
So while these factors were taken as movie mistakes, they are all things that could really happen to people in the woods, even in the modern world. Knowing these facts could make the new Blair Witch film that much more scary — and that much more fun.
[Photo by Eric Charbonneau/Invision for Lionsgate/AP Images]
