I’ll never forget first hearing about a new Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett movie back in 2015, The Woods. At the time, I thought we were getting another original movie from the filmmakers behind You’re Next and The Guest. What could be better than that? Then the time came to see the film at a special screening in the summer of 2016 at San Diego Comic-Con. Not only did I wind up loving the film, but being in that very first audience meant I was able to be part of a huge surprise – The Woods was actually a new Blair Witch movie. I was thrilled by the reveal while watching film and for an added boost of excitement, the marketing team swapped all The Woods posters in the theater lobby to Blair Witch ones so that when we walked out of the theater, the buzz continued.
Clearly the big reveal had the intended effect on me, but what happens when you do something like that for an audience of 300 and not the wide moviegoing public? While on Collider’s The Witching Hour promoting his feature directorial debut, Seance, Barrett took a moment to revisit the Blair Witch experience and discuss what things were like from his standpoint.
As much as I appreciated being part of that first audience, Barrett began by pinpointing a problematic quality of that SDCC event:
“The ultimate revelation of Blair Witch, which I could obviously unpack quite a lot, but the short version is we made a film in secret that it turned out, we made for about 300 people.”
After that SDCC screening, Blair Witch went on to make a mere $45.2 million at the worldwide box office. Not the worst total when you consider the film had a reported $5 million production budget, but one could imagine Lionsgate had far higher hopes for the film during its big screen run. Can the film’s box office blunder be blamed on the reveal screening and the reveal screening alone? Absolutely not. Barrett continued by highlighting a slew of other challenges they faced that had nothing to do with the quality of the film or the promotion of it. These challenges simply came from the fact that they were making a Blair Witch movie, period.
“Ultimately, a lot of people are just sick of found footage. A lot of people still don’t like the original Blair Witch Project and are still mad about it, and they don’t want a sequel. And all the people who do love The Blair Witch Project also didn’t want a sequel, and they have very complicated feelings about the previous one. So we were kind of in this little niche market of people that wanted a very sincere sequel to the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project.”
Yet another element that could have contributed to the film’s reception? The fact that Barrett and Wingard made this movie in secret.
“Because we made it in secret, we never stopped to ask if anyone liked this idea or wanted this or thought what we were doing was a good idea. A lot of filmmakers talk very negatively about the process of audience testing in Hollywood, and obviously that’s because it can often be used to push an agenda, right? We think of audience testing as the way movies are made, are dumbed down and taken away from their creators. But audience testing is great because any director who doesn’t want to know how people are going to react to their film, I think is making a huge mistake. And I don’t care if you think those people are smart or educated cinephiles or not; they’re your audience. So Blair Witch is a film that if we had tested it at an early stage, conceptually, I think a lot of red flags would have come up and we would have realized, ‘Oh, people don’t understand that we’re not, for example, saying that we’re directly showing the witch.’ And by the way, our credits are misleading, which we didn’t realize either.”
Making a movie is an intense and incredibly all-consuming process. When you’re so hyper focused on one piece of content for an extended period of time, you likely won’t look at it the way a first-time viewer might. That’s where these test screenings can really come in handy, a luxury Barrett and Wingard didn’t have on Blair Witch. Barrett continued:
“So there was a lot of things about making a movie in secrecy that handicap you creatively in ways that you wouldn’t perceive at the time because you’re making a movie in secrecy and you’re not talking to anyone else, and everyone you’re talking to has been working on Blair Witch for the last several years and you’ve started speaking basically your own weird language of references at that point and so you don’t ever think … I mean, there was a moment specifically in the edit room for Blair Witch where I remember Adam cut something out of the movie and I was like, ‘Yeah, we should cut that. It’s boring.’ And it was this crucial little bit of information that then a bunch of people flagged as a confusing thing. But we were just so bored of looking at it and we hadn’t had any input from anyone else. So that’s honestly, I think the larger answer of how making that in secrecy I think hurt the film, is because we did not understand the feedback in advance of the audience that we were making the film for.”
While there’s no changing Blair Witch’s rough run now, there was a lesson to be learned from the experience and that lesson wound up paving the way to Seance. Here’s how Barrett put it:
“In hindsight, it’s impossible to say what people wanted. The Woods, which is what Lionsgate was calling that film prior to calling it Blair Witch, I didn’t like that title either because I could only think of the Lucky McKee movie. I think a lot of people were hoping Adam and I were doing an original horror movie and we didn’t realize that. We kind of looked at You’re Next and The Guest and what we perceived as their failure – and it’s not our perception that they both failed at the box office, that’s pretty much mathematically provable – so we were looking at those as not things to be repeated or imitated. It was only kind of when I wrote Blair Witch and I realized that actually people did like the weird thing we were doing, they just didn’t want to necessarily pay money to see it in theaters, that I was like, ‘Aha, Seance!’”
If you’d like to hear more from Barrett aboutSeance,The Guest, his newFace/Offfilm and loads more, you can catch his full Witching Hour interview in the video at the top of this article or using the podcast embed below:
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