Any "Blair Witch Project" obsessives who started combing the "Yellowjacket's" finale frame by frame the moment they heard it was directed by Eduardo Sánchez can stop now. The Showtime series may tick many of the boxes that made Sanchez and Daniel Myrick's first film a cultural icon — one half of the series deals with freaked-out young people lost in very creepy woods dotted with disturbing iconography — but Sánchez did not slide a random stick man into any "Yellowjacket" scenes.
He was tempted, he says. He managed to slide a "Blair Witch" symbol into the last episode of "Supernatural" he directed. Which, as the forest gods would have it, was filmed in the same Vancouver, Canada, location where much of the wilderness portion of "Yellowjackets" was filmed. Until recently, the paintball park that stands in for the forest home of the stranded girls' soccer team was the woodland home of "Supernatural," for which Sánchez directed five episodes, including one in the 15th and final season. In fact, when he described the cabin in which the Yellowjackets find shelter after their plane crashes to "Supernatural" production designer Jerry Wanek, Wanek said: "I built that cabin."
No cinematic storyteller should turn down the combined juju of "Blair Witch" and "Supernatural," but "Yellowjackets" is doing just fine with its own eerie and triggering symbol. Nor does Sanchez need to remind anyone of the enduring power of the Witch; she continues to manifest in everything from the little wooden figures in the first season of "True Detective" to the hot new Netflix series "Archive 81," which opens with a young woman in obvious distress talking into a video camera and begging for help.
