Movie Review - Blair Witch

COLLEGE students Lisa (­Callie Hernandez), James (James Allen McCune), Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid) decide to venture into the Black Hills Forest in ­Maryland, where James’ sister Heather went missing 22 years ago.
The group is unperturbed by the Blair Witch myths, and come across two locals who offer to act as guides through the woods.
Everything seems fine until it gets dark and they get attacked by supernatural forces, proving that the Blair Witch legend might just be real.
The one thing that puts me off when it comes to horror movies is the found-footage style. As a sequel to 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, I couldn’t expect many changes to the format, but I felt that director Adam Wingard did a brilliant job adding modern technology into the scenes to improve the visual stability.
For example, the filmmaker ­college students now have GPS-equipped camera earpieces and drones instead of relying on boring old hand-held camcorders.
But my issue with the format when it comes to horror is still the tacky buzzing sound and camera glitches, matched with overexposed scenes from a light source, and the deafening screams that prove to be more irritating than chilling.
There were a multitude of jump scares scattered throughout the show but to my disappointment, only in the form of noise. I actually expected at least a ghostly figure to scare the characters, but there were other things to compensate for the scare-factor, such as the sudden discovery of humanoid stick figures hanging from trees.
I had an issue with the choices the characters made – they didn’t seem realistic enough and made it hard for me to relate to them – but then again, most horror movies begin with bad decisions.