When taken completely on its own merits, 2016’s Blair Witch isn’t bad. It’s an above-average movie in the “found footage” horror sub-genre, written and directed by the team that created You’re Next (which is very good) and The Guest (which I have not seen). There are plenty of jump scares, some surprises, and a real escalation of horror that caps off with an especially intense ending. It’s hard to deny the film’s competence, which is ironically the movie’s biggest flaw.

Blair Witch feels like it was created for all of the people who saw 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project” and said “That sucked! It’s so boring!” 2016’s film is the original turned up to 11. Instead of whispers and laughter in the shadows, we have deafening noises and uprooted trees. The creepy stick figures that served as a creepy harbinger of doom in the original have their own twisted purpose here, there’s more gore, more definitive fates for the different characters, and a far lesser desire to hide the supernatural elements from the camera.

In addition to the more overt horror tropes, the devotion to authenticity that made the original an enduring classic is completely ignored here. Instead of a trio of average-looking student filmmakers, we have a cast of six trendy, attractive LA actors. Rather than have the cast improvise their dialogue and play off of each other naturally, the whole thing is scripted in a way that feels horror-movie natural, but far too direct and pre-meditated to pass for real life.

Even the footage, most of which is supposedly shot from bluetooth cameras mounted to the characters’ ears, is unconvincing. It’s completely steady the majority of the time, obviously shot in 4K with perfect white-balancing, and employs a shallow depth of focus that’s always perfectly focused around the shot’s subject. I understand that director Adam Wingard and cinematographer Robby Baumgartner havea are very talented, and likely couldn’t help themselves from making the film look good, but the ridiculously well-composed nature of the footage is counterproductive to the films purpose.

All of the above may be fine for a new horror franchise, or even possibly a Blair Witch reboot, but it really feels out of place in what is supposed to be a direct sequel to the original movie. The original film is special because, if you didn’t know better, it could very easily pass for real found footage. The characters seem real because, for the most part, they’re playing themselves. They joke around, they get mad with one another, but it never feels like its in service to some pre-ordained arc. The footage itself is never overtly unreal, either. We know that their situation makes no logical sense; you can’t walk in one direction all day and end up back where you started, and the film ends in a house that should not exist. But we never see any witches, or voodoo, or people floating, or anything that would serve as proof of the supernatural. It’s believable that somebody could have stumbled upon these tapes, and they still wouldn’t have changed the world.

Reading interviews with the writer and director of the film and listening to the writer talk extensively about the original Blair Witch Project, there is no doubt in my mind that the new movie was created by people who not only love the original movie, but have a deep understanding of it as well. It is unfortunate, then, that they intentionally backed away from the very elements that made the original unique. The new film is driven by a love of the originals vague mythology, but eschews the authenticity that was the actual driving force in the original’s success. The result is a film that, despite its general competence, is generally forgettable and a blemish on the original’s legacy.