Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)

 

Director: Joe Berlinger

Screenplay: Joe Berlinger and Dick Beebe

Cast: Jeffrey Donovan as Jeffrey Patterson, Erica Leerhsen as Erica Geerson, Stephen Barker Turner as Stephen Ryan Parker, Kim Director as Kim Diamond, Tristine Skyler as Tristen Ryler, Lanny Flaherty as Sheriff Ronald Cravens, Lauren Hulsey as Eileen Treacle, Raynor Scheine as Rustin Parr

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #231

 

I thought the movie was cool.

The inherent issue with Book of Shadows is simple. It is a generic horror film attempting to latch onto the original Blair Witch Project, in a position commissioned on the sudden success of a film that spearheaded the formation of a horror subgenre, with all the difficulty of trying to franchise it. The original was a low budget, even micro-budget, production and one where its structure is a vague "witch" lore, even if fleshed out material, you are trying to expand to capitalise on the unexpected box office success on. Even if it means the most early 2000s and diverse soundtrack possible - Diamanda Galás abruptly on the same soundtrack as At the Drive-In, System of a Down, Queens of the Stone Age, White Zombie, and before his name became mud, Marilyn Manson - you will struggle unless you find a way around a film, for any criticisms of mine, was still immensely unique at the time to not pale in comparison.

Structurally the sequel is caught in a compromised position from the get-go, because whilst the pre-credit prologue is brilliant, the direction taken is attempting to capitalise on the original's success but pulling at a prequel where you have to add so much to the material. As in most cases, nothing is inherently bad on paper. Openly meta-textual, with real footage including Jay Leno to Conan O'Brien and even film critic Roger Ebert, set in context of the Blair Witch Project being a popular film where, blurring reality, the real location of Burkittsville in Maryland is swamped constantly by tourists obsessed with the film. The prologue is exceptional, a pre-opening credits sequence of a significantly better film, which is shot in interviews of townsfolk who are either annoyed by this, talking of this all being fake or a nuisance, or taking advantage as is the case of one older woman is by selling twig figures and even rocks from her back garden.

Book of Shadows was a film tampered with, such as with Disposable Teens by Marilyn Manson being a replacement to Witchcraft by Frank Sinatra in the opening credits, but the reality is that the project feels hesitant throughout its form of trying to work from the source material, playing safe to a huge disadvantage even if the original cut had fewer of the artistic clichés requested on the film. The odd choice, which in another context should have made a compelling film, was hiring Joe Berlinger as the director, a documentary filmmaker by this point who gained acclaim for the true crime narratives of Paradise Lost (1996). He would go on another tangent after this with Some Kind of Monster (2004), an acclaimed but also notorious documentary following the band Metallica recording its divisive St. Anger album, effectively therapy on LP in its long messiness and nu metal tinges. This is not the first time a filmmaker famous for documentary work has stridden briefly into fiction films. Michael Moore has Canadian Bacon (1995), whilst Errol Morris has an ultra obscure film called The Dark Wind (1991). Whilst the idea of the Blair Witch perfectly fits his filmography as a subject to subvert, Berlinger's link to this film is an abrupt tangent as a mainstream horror film in what we ended up with.

There is also a sense, whilst this film was micromanaged heavily, that the film was not going to work from the script level, or that truthfully for myself, this is still a very conventional film knowing full well what could have been. Considering what is already within the original's background, even having a fake documentary to present its lore, intertwining with American urban legends and folk culture, it is sad that the final production is not as interesting as the background of what the Book of Shadows was meant to be suggests.

The prologue shows what this should have been, and shows the great film from Berlinger, but that is merely a prologue. It begins properly with a Blair Witch tour group, one of two, in one funny moment involving a rival tour group in one scene bickering together. It has a fascinating group to have worked with - a former mental asylum patient who runs the tour, with a heterosexual couple  working on a book on the Blair Witch craze, a female Wiccan witch who finds there is anti-witch bias, and a female goth with possible psychic powers. Again, nothing is amiss, aside from the fact the film never gets to anything complicated. After one night, they wake up after all their partying with all their equipment baring camera tapes having been destroyed and with no knowledge of what happened. It is a simple premise, one not really connectable to the same material, and heavily reliant on Berlinger being one director/co-writer that plays the subjective reality card, what is reality and what is not as the group realise their relatives are distorted, but refuses to tell the viewer which is real.

The problems being when, for a Blair Witch sequel, a ghost girl who twitches is uses for a quick scare, and even if that was a concession to the producers, this film structurally is gambling entirely on the notion of subjective reality but still being very conventional. It builds to an obvious twist, but even if it did not, you have little to work from beyond even the lack of a clear insight to where reality is. The characters really do not work beyond stereotypes, such as our Goth character being introduced in a graveyard laid on a tombstone, but even then, this does embolden that, flaws and all, the first Blair Witch Project was more unpredictable and interesting. Without resources, that film had to focus on building what characterisation they had and without immediate access to traditional scare tactics you could access on a larger budget.

In something that is clearly from the VHS release, Book of Shadows even ends after the credits  has a tacked on gimmick of hidden ghostly images and letters hidden onscreen, having to rewind the film (i.e. as you could do on videotape) to see. This is almost charming, a William Castle gimmick but Castle, as a legendary horror director and producer who came up with elaborate gimmicks, would have promoted this upfront and, if he had grasped the DVD format, readapted this to work for the new technology and a possible buying audience. Here it misses the point. There is even a joke, as the characters talk about the first film, of why in moments of fear a trio of two men and one woman never had sex in the heightened emotion. It is crass, but also The Bogus Witch Project (2000), whilst not a great parody compilation, got to this just and was closer to the source material in tone in general.