Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett on Making ‘Blair Witch’

Blair Witch, a sequel to 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, arrives in theaters this weekend. The new movie centers on James Donahue who goes searching for his missing sister Heather in the woods after finding footage that he believes to be of her. BackstageOL’s Dave Morales talked with the film’s writer and director about making the horror flick.

“I love scaring people,” writer Simon Barrett said. “But I also, just as a viewer, love being scared. I mean, if a movie can get me and surprise me, that’s my favorite thing as a viewer.”

“I think our whole approach to this film was that we wanted to do our first full-on…horror film,” director Adam Wingard added. “We’re known through the circuit as horror filmmakers in general, but truthfully, we’ve never really made a full-on horror movie where the full commitment was being scary. We’ve done a lot of kinda of funny deconstructions of the genre, but this is our first time where from the very get-go, we said we’re going to try to make one of the scariest movies ever made.”

Watch our interview with Wingard and Barrett below: