Horror is a genre for jaded and cynical idealists. Theoretically, horror could yield perfect movies — entirely experiential, composed of sight and sound that operate together on a visceral level, with conflict rooted directly in fundamental psychological impasses. Yet horror movies tend to disappoint, especially for those fans who believe that "Great Horror" could exist. What stands between the ideal and each realization? Is it the overexplanatory tendency of modern horror movies? The monotonous parade of generic, pretty actor types who populate them? Is it that they must always compete with our nostalgic sense of what the perfect horror movie was? In Blair Witch’s case, this last problem is certainly the case, which is not to say that the movie is a failure. Rather, it is set up to lose, much like the stranded campers in the space-time warp that they stumble into in each iteration of the story. How could you compete with not just the experience of the original movie, but our memory of that experience?

This is a direct sequel to 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, with the much ­younger brother of first movie’s protagonist, Heather, setting off to those same woods again after seeing what he believes to be Heather in a newly found piece of footage. He sets off with three friends, one of whom conveniently fancies herself a documentarian, to meet the two shifty (but still very pretty) locals who discovered the tape. As you’d expect, night inevitably falls, and conditions deteriorate, but I wouldn’t say the movie follows the original’s form too much.

The original movie is an almost pure example of horror premised on pursuit within a rigged system, where logic, physics or other laws we use to navigate our surroundings are subverted (see also, It Follows, The Ring). It’s a great device, mostly because it generates dread that doesn't require jump scares; instead it drenches every moment with potential danger. But this new version adds on several other horror tropes: the uncanny hillbilly (see, Deliverance, season 1 of True Detective), the outside invading the body and its horrific reemergence (see, Black Swan, Alien), the inscrutable malevolent force that generates a massive amount of noise (see, Lost seasons 1 and 2), and many, many, many jump scares (see, all horror movies). This dilutes the elegance of the original, but probably casts a wider net for whatever gets you going.

For those who are invested in the mythology of the Blair witch, there is ample new material to work with here. There are also plenty of callbacks to the original movie with the familiar freaky artifacts and that house. I would hesitate to add more here for fear of spoiling the movie, but honestly, this review contains no spoilers because I watched the last twenty minutes out of just a sliver of my left eye. Maybe this sequel can’t compete with my childhood memory of watching The Blair Witch Project, but it did succeed in basically reducing me to the state of a child.