The Blair Witch Project is arguably the poster child for found footage horror, believed to be real when it was first released and still holding up years later as a terrifying film. Yet it somehow managed to be followed up by one of the most infamously terrible horror sequels ever, and its third installment also never managed to truly capture the low-budget, suggestive and ominous feel that made the cult classic so successful. Compared to Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, the 2016 sequel, Blair Witch, returns a little more to home with its found footage format, but its most glaring deviation is its overt, on-screen deaths. Ironically, this also paves the way to the film’s most iconic scene, which is also the first on-screen death. Whether you enjoyed the modern feel of this new franchise installment or not, you can’t deny the unexpected thrill of this death, in all its brutal glory.
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Talia Is Snapped in Half in ‘Blair Witch’
Blair Witch completely ignores the 2000 sequel and directly follows the original, where Heather’s brother, James (James Allen McCune), ventures into the woods with his friends and a couple of locals to find his sister. They find out the locals were initially messing with them, so Talia (Valorie Curry) and Lane (Wes Robinson) are kicked out of the camp. A day later, the two suddenly appeared among the bushes, but for them, five days had already passed, and they are in bad shape. Terrified, Lane runs away while Talia is too desperate for food and re-joins the camp. However, when they wake up in the morning, panic slowly ensues as the sun never rises, pagan symbols are strung up on the trees and Ashley (Corbin Reid), who is injured, accuses Talia of orchestrating all the strange things that are happening.
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The actual death scene is utterly brutal, and Talia is the victim. Frustrated, Ashley grabs a stick figure that contains Talia’s hair and snaps it in half, and as she does so, Talia is instantaneously and mercilessly snapped in half. Expanding on the franchise lore and adding a voodoo doll component to the stick figures is skin-crawling enough, but the abrupt and sharp nature of Talia’s death is what makes it memorable. It is an absurdly clean and crisp snap for what is a gruesome death, as Talia immediately contorts to the ground. The jarring scene is shrouded in darkness, only lit up by James’ dim torch and framed by shaky, handheld camerawork where we can only make out the outlines of her mangled limbs and grimy face. Accompanied by the grisly sound of crunching bones, no matter how averse you may or may not be to this sequel, that snap is not something you can easily forget.
Talia’s Death Is a Turning Point in ‘Blair Witch’
Unlike the previous sequel, Blair Witch returns to the found footage format that made the original so popular. With a similar framing of people entering the woods and unexplainable occurrences plaguing them, it is easy to assume that the film would retain similar rules to The Blair Witch Project. As such, we are wildly unprepared for Talia’s on-screen death, technically unprecedented in the franchise if we only count found footage films. It doesn’t feel like there is any build up to the death, especially as the scenes preceding it are full of anxiety, terror and people taking their fears out on each other that we recognize from the cult classic. Talia’s death sneaks up on us and becomes the turning point of the movie, tonally and in regard to our expectations.
Frantic energy is curdled up for the remainder of the film, pushing forth the terror caused by witnessing such a grisly death in unrelenting waves. Even in the more hushed scenes, there are undercurrents of the same jumpiness and panic, much different to the uncertainty of the first film. More notably, Talia’s death marks the changing rules of the film. The first half of Blair Witch plays out like the original, and we are lulled into a safety net of expecting the rehashing of similar events. Now we don’t know what to anticipate anymore. Whether you appreciated the departure from the original or not, you can’t deny the promise of that egregious death and the unbidden thrill of excitement that signaled unknown territory. It was everything a death scene is supposed to be: out of nowhere, powerful within its premise, and just plain sickening.
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