| No great surprise this, but with zero-budget word-of-mouth horror phenomenon Paranormal Activity cleaning up at the box office, the creator of a certain other zero-budget word-of-mouth horror phenomenon from a decade ago, is talking a revisit. Anyone for Blair Witch 3? "I wouldn't be completely honest if I said I wasn't jealous of Paranormal Activity," Eduardo Sanchez, co-creator of The Blair Witch Project (along with Daniel Myrick) tells the Toronto Star. "There's the feeling that, I could have done this... I know how to make these films. To me it's like, man, maybe I should go back and kind of milk this one more time." The original Blair Witch, as any fule kno, took Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, Michael C Williams and a camcorder, dumped them in the woods to improvise, and scared the crap out of them for a week. The resulting film, presented as the found footage of a group of missing hikers, raked in a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide, and led to the rush-release of Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, which immediately killed the nascent franchise stone dead. To be fair though, Myrick and Sanchez had no part in the ill-fated (and completely bollocks) sequel. Their mooted Blair Witch 3 will, if it happens, ignore it completely. Having seen Cloverfield, Sanchez now believes the first-person shakycam schtick has been done to death, and is talking instead about a technique he refers to as "mixed first person", pointing to District 9 as an example of what he means. "It seems like doing exactly the same thing as before would be a mistake," he says, although the treatment he and Myrick have prepared does contain non-leading roles for the original stars. "We're at the step right now where we're about to pitch it to Lionsgate, who own the rights," Sanchez concludes. "They'll either greenlight it or completely squash it." Fingers crossed, readers? Or are you sending Sanchez off to stand in the corner? |
