The Blair Witch Project's co-director Eduardo Sanchez has struggled to follow-up that surprise success in the decade since it hit. His subsequent Altered and Seventh Moon went straight to video, but his fortunes have improved. Lovely Molly** will shortly invade cinema screens, and the trailer has just arrived to shakily follow you around.
It's strange to think now what a novelty Blair Witch's found-footage schtick was back in 1999. Since then it's had its thunder well and truly stolen, not least by the Paranormal Activitys, which seem to have some echoes here (a ghost that follows you from house to house; a lead character that may be posessed - the film's original title was Posession). So that's a bit of a problem for a film trumpeting that it's, "From the filmmakers that started it all".
The idea that Lovely Molly will "redefine horror once again" is perhaps a bit of a stretch, given the patented horror movie trailer beats on display here: a "Boo!" moment at a window; a character walking slowly down into a cellar; a "Behind you!/Who's there?" moment; green, night-vision-cam, etc. "Maybe we shouldn't have moved into this place," says Gretchen Lodge. She might be on to something there.
Still, there's clearly a marketing agenda at work here. Early reviews suggest that the scares are subtle, so the trailer-cutters could be reaching for something more obvious to cram into the promo, and maybe there's more to** Lovely Molly** than immediately meets the eye. Perhaps it'll be strange and interesting. It's at least not wholly hand-held; Sanchez has talked before about the "mixed first-person" style of things like District 9 as a technique he admires.
The film's been on the horror festival circuit for a while - it played most recently at this year's SXSW - and gets its full US release on May 18. There's no UK date so far, so it may yet grace Kim's dungeon...