sequel

Nineties psychological horror The Blair Witch Project wasn’t an instant hit. Though a triumph with critics, its box office success was slow, but it now stands as one of the most financially successful independent films of all time, and as a forefather of the found footage trend. Not only did The Blair Witch Project pave the way for found footage horrors like [Rec], V/H/S, and the Paranormal Activity series, sci-fis and fantasies like Cloverfield, Trollhunter and Chronicle also used the format.

The idea of the “secret sequel” seems to be a new marketing scheme in horror cinema as of late. Earlier this year, a sequel to the film Cloverfield came out, called 10 Cloverfield Lane, yet nobody knew it was a sequel until a couple months before its premiere. In similar fashion, Blair Witch, the sequel to 1999’s seminal horror The Blair Witch Project, was originally filmed under the fake title “The Woods” so as to hide its true intentions.

2016 is already shaping up to become the year of reboots and sequels; whether or not they are deemed acceptable is a different matter. Now You See Me indeed worked as a solo endeavour back when the magic was introduced three years previous. The existence of the sequel may come as a surprise to some, due to the mixed responses circling the first instalment.

Independence Day came out when I was 14. I was a huge X-Files fan (I did a school project on Area 51) and so thought it was pretty much the greatest film ever. It was also at this time that I began to fall in love with movies, and Independence Day was part of that trend of 90’s summer blockbusters that opened my eyes to what contemporary cinema meant to a lot of people.

As a society, recent events have left us more divided than ever. The people on one side of this socio-political argument are trying to undermine unrepresented voices in the culture by calling for a cry back to the “good old days” and using hateful rhetoric in order to get what they want. The other side are being labelled as mere “liberals” with a politically correct agenda that isn’t attuned to the desires of the majority of people.