The New BLAIR WITCH Was Hiding In Plain Sight All Along

Like many horror folks who pay attention to this sort of stuff, I've been hearing rumors that The Woods, the upcoming film from the You're Next/The Guest team of Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, was actually a stealth sequel to The Blair Witch Project, the 1999 film that was made for pennies and outgrossed several of that summer's blockbusters. But I didn't want to get my hopes up (you might recall I am a fan not just of the original, but of the "franchise" as a whole), so I hadn't paid much attention or went down any rabbit holes looking for clues that might prove its connection one way or the other...

...and that can be proven (well, at least with the timestamp of my tweet) by the fact that it wasn't until tonight, when someone tweeted a row of posters for The Woods outside its premiere screening at Comic Con, that I realized that the answer was literally right there in front of us. Our own Scott Wampler even picked up on it months ago when the poster was unveiled, saying that it looked like something might be hidden in the negative space, but I never read his post or even looked that closely at the poster. But tonight, I saw that row of posters and noticed it almost instantly. Here's the poster again for those who, like me, never gave it a good look before:

See it yet?

OK, well (and forgive my crude Photoshop skills) look at it like THIS:

I mean, wow. In an age where movie posters are usually hot garbage at best, this one is subtly brilliant. Per the EW article that spilled the beans, some of the film's major crew members weren't even made privy to the connection, because it was such a big secret - and yet here they were practically daring us to notice the film's iconic "Stickman" logo right there. So awesome. It's a shame the new poster lays it all out there (for obvious reasons), because I liked the idea of basically turning it into a "Magic Eye", daring you to look until you noticed the arrangement.

The Woods, or Blair Witch as it's now known (it's the post-Fast and Furious world; sequels get fewer words in the title, not more), hits theaters September 16th. I'll be there, praying for huge box office so that Wingard and Barrett can follow it up the following year with Book of Shadows: The Woods 2.