Adam Wingard

For years now, Death Note has been one of the more popular franchises in Japanese popular culture. Originally a manga series, Death Note has since spun out into multiple television shows and four live-action feature films, making it all-but-inevitable that the franchise would eventually find its way into the hands of a Hollywood studio. Thus, when Netflix announced that it would be releasing a Death Note movie with Adam Wingard (You’re Next, The Guest) directing, people were curious to see what kind of cultural accommodations Netflix would make for its Japanese adaptation. The answer? Not many.

In just a few years the movies’ most famous gorilla will clash with the biggest and baddest kaiju in a giant monster movie mashup. Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong will be the fourth entry in Legendary’s MonsterVerse – no, not that monster universe – which will find the Japanese kaiju meeting the furry beast. But the Blair Witch and You’re Next filmmaker wants to bring something unique to his monster mash: monsters that will make you cry.

Adam Wingard’s adaptation of popular anime series Death Note drew a lot of heat before the public even saw a single frame, as fans of the original were displeased to learn he’d set the film in the U.S. instead of the original Japan and make the Asian lead into a white guy, a move we shall henceforth refer to as “Ghost in the Shelling.” And while the question of whitewashing will most likely persist on through the film’s August 25 release, we still have yet to see whether it will be a competent horror film on non-politicized terms. Today, the public can start to get an impression of whether the film is garden-variety bad in addition to being #problematic.

For most fans of the Death Note manga and/or anime series, it may seem a little odd that Netflix’s new movie based on the property is set in the U.S. It was, after all, a Japanese series to begin with. Recently, director Adam Wingard explained why he thought it was necessary for his version of the story that it be set in America, with American actors.

Regardless of how you felt about last year’s Blair Witch, Adam Wingard has earned more than enough goodwill with genre flicks like You’re Next and The Guest to ensure that we’ll be stoked to see whatever he does next. That would be Death Note, his American adaptation of the classic Japanese manga, starring Willem Dafoe as a spiky-headed and mega-creepy, self-described “death god” (I mean, what did you expect).

With production soon underway on Godzilla: King of the Monsters, it’s time for Warner Bros. and Legendary to start checking the boxes of the next installment: Godzilla vs. Kong. Much like movies with “vs.” somewhere in their title, this one will feature two characters likely beating the living daylights out of each other, perhaps before becoming friends by bonding over their moms. And since this monster cinematic universe is akin to indie directors moving from the sandbox to the big kid playground, Warners has settled on their next small-time director for their big-time blockbuster. Adam Wingard, whose credits include You’re Next, The Guest, and Blair Witch, has been tapped to helm Godzilla vs. Kong.

What would you do if you mysterious notebook fell into your hands and gave you the power to kill anyone? Maybe you’d write the name of a high school enemy or a crappy ex in the notebook just for giggles, then realizing its murderous magic is for real, quickly toss it out the window and run away. But for Light Turner, he decides to use that notebook for all the power it gives him.

Adam Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett have collaborated on several projects together, including recent genre favorites You’re Next and The Guest, in which they subversively repurposed familiar tropes in new and original ways — which is what makes their decision to create a sequel to The Blair Witch Project kind of surprising. A solid follow-up to the 1999 found footage classic, Blair Witch offers recognizable beats with bigger, more frightening (and louder) scares, and a third act that features a pretty clever twist. Ahead of the film’s release, we had a chance to speak with Wingard about the challenges of making a sequel to one of the most beloved horror films, the evolution of found footage and that crazy, mind-bending ending.

Let’s give the Blair Witch some credit: She may be a vengeful demon from the 17th century who likes to torture documentary filmmakers and camping enthusiasts, but as monstrous hell-beasts go, she’s pretty tech-savvy. Back in the olden days of 1999 when the first Blair With Project came out, cell phones and GPS barely existed; tricking unsuspecting college kids into getting lost in the backwoods of Maryland was a relative snap. This new generation of victims come equipped with all kinds of gadgets: GoPros and cell phones and drones capable of surveilling dozens of miles of land — all of which might help these truth seekers make their way back to civilization. The witch disables them all; draining the batteries from their surveillance equipment, blocking the signals from their global positioning systems, and crashing their drone in a tree. Mercifully, she doesn’t deactivate any of the cameras they’re wearing, so we can see her incessant torture of these poor unfortunate souls.

It’s back to the woods we go in the newest trailer for ‘Blair Witch,’ the surprise sequel to The Blair Witch Project that had one of the coolest reveals in recent memory. Marketed as simply ‘The Woods,’ the film had an early screening at San Diego Comic Con, at which the real title and connection to the original film was announced. When the audience exited the theater after it was over, they saw that during the screening the big poster advertising ‘The Woods’ had been swapped for a ‘Blair Witch’ poster.