Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
Year: 2000
Director: Joe Berlinger
Starring: Kim Director, Jeffrey Donovan, Erica Leerhsen, Stephen Ryan Parker & Tristine Ryler
Runtime: 99 mins
BBFC: 15
Published: 10/11/20
Director: Joe Berlinger
Starring: Kim Director, Jeffrey Donovan, Erica Leerhsen, Stephen Ryan Parker & Tristine Ryler
Runtime: 99 mins
BBFC: 15
Published: 10/11/20
It would be an understatement to say 1999’s The Blair Witch Project was a popular film. In fact, the film was so popular that it created its own genre, the now infamous Found Footage film. The tale of three student filmmakers venturing into the woods to make a documentary on the legend of the Blair Witch only to find themselves lost, terrified, and hunted by an unseen presence. I was only young when The Blair Witch Project came out but I certainly remember the fanfare around the film in the years following its release, but something I was unaware of until I was much older was its sequel that released just a year later, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.
Book of Shadows is set in November 1999 at the height of Blair Witch pandemonium. The film opens with various news and review clips of the first film detailing how the it became a cultural phenomenon, and just how it affected the townspeople of Burkittsville where the film was set and made. Burkittsville local Jeff (Jeffrey Donovan) owns a Blair Witch tourist experience, The Blair Witch Hunt. His clientele on his latest tour are students Stephen and Tristen (Stephen Ryan Parker & Tristine Ryler), Wiccan witch Erica (Erica Leerhsen), and goth girl Kim (Kim Director). Together they venture into the Black Hills Forest and set up camp. The group drink and take drugs, have an altercation with another tour group later on that evening, and then wake up in the morning to find their campsite trashed. The group head back to Jeff’s house to try and salvage some footage they’d recovered from their broken camera equipment. The footage is jumbled and makes no sense, on top of this the group then begin to experience strange phenomena as they believe they have been cursed by the Blair Witch.
There’s a very good reason why a lot of people don’t know about Book of Shadows and it’s because the film is terrible. In fact, there’s almost nothing good about it at all, and despite throwing references back to the first film every few seconds it has almost nothing to do with the original Blair Witch Project. Director Joe Berlinger places the sole blame on studio interference and states that the film audiences got was not the film he made, with various post-mortems of the film over the years revealing that to be the truth.
Book of Shadows is set in November 1999 at the height of Blair Witch pandemonium. The film opens with various news and review clips of the first film detailing how the it became a cultural phenomenon, and just how it affected the townspeople of Burkittsville where the film was set and made. Burkittsville local Jeff (Jeffrey Donovan) owns a Blair Witch tourist experience, The Blair Witch Hunt. His clientele on his latest tour are students Stephen and Tristen (Stephen Ryan Parker & Tristine Ryler), Wiccan witch Erica (Erica Leerhsen), and goth girl Kim (Kim Director). Together they venture into the Black Hills Forest and set up camp. The group drink and take drugs, have an altercation with another tour group later on that evening, and then wake up in the morning to find their campsite trashed. The group head back to Jeff’s house to try and salvage some footage they’d recovered from their broken camera equipment. The footage is jumbled and makes no sense, on top of this the group then begin to experience strange phenomena as they believe they have been cursed by the Blair Witch.
There’s a very good reason why a lot of people don’t know about Book of Shadows and it’s because the film is terrible. In fact, there’s almost nothing good about it at all, and despite throwing references back to the first film every few seconds it has almost nothing to do with the original Blair Witch Project. Director Joe Berlinger places the sole blame on studio interference and states that the film audiences got was not the film he made, with various post-mortems of the film over the years revealing that to be the truth.
The only part of the film that could really be attributed to Berlinger (and the best part of the film) is the opening sequence where the news clips strung together appear to set the film up as a documentary about the effect the Blair Witch Project had on the community of Burkittsville, and the social paranoia it created with its very realistic and misleading online viral marketing campaign.
The film takes a complete nosedive once this prologue ends and the opening credits start rolling as it’s clear the studio really didn’t understand what to do with Berlinger’s film. We get sweeping airborne panoramic shots of the Black Hills Forest set to some heavy rock music with lots of swear words and screaming in it, interspersed with regular cuts away to people being mutilated. This is about as far away from the first film as you can get and it only gets worse from there.
It’s clear the film was going for a psychological horror angle based around social paranoias and calling out the original films dishonest marketing. This could have been great if handled with subtlety, but instead we get a film that is filled with jump scares that fail to land because there’s no build to them, attempts at gory violence that isn’t actually gory, and drug fuelled orgies. All of this, combined with the wooden acting, over the top caricature stereotypes, and the awful soundtrack makes it clear that the film is not attempting to scare, but just desperately trying and failing to be edgy. It's also strange revisiting this film after the Slenderman phenomenon and subsequent Wisconsin 'Slenderman stabbing' in 2014. It shows how reality can certainly be just as strange as fiction and that what Book of Shadows was going for is completely grounded in reality despite all of its adsurdities.
Despite carrying the Blair Witch name it’s very clear why it is the subtitle of the film, because Book of Shadows is not a Blair Witch film, no matter how hard it tries to be. It doesn’t matter how desperately it tries to cling to popular iconography of the original film, it takes all the good ideas put forward by the director and squanders them in a film that is barely coherent as a final product, and goes out of its way to be nothing like the original film in the worst possible way. But it does serve as a warning about letting social paranoias take hold of the mentally vulnerable. If you’ve never seen the film, it’s probably best to keep it that way.
The film takes a complete nosedive once this prologue ends and the opening credits start rolling as it’s clear the studio really didn’t understand what to do with Berlinger’s film. We get sweeping airborne panoramic shots of the Black Hills Forest set to some heavy rock music with lots of swear words and screaming in it, interspersed with regular cuts away to people being mutilated. This is about as far away from the first film as you can get and it only gets worse from there.
It’s clear the film was going for a psychological horror angle based around social paranoias and calling out the original films dishonest marketing. This could have been great if handled with subtlety, but instead we get a film that is filled with jump scares that fail to land because there’s no build to them, attempts at gory violence that isn’t actually gory, and drug fuelled orgies. All of this, combined with the wooden acting, over the top caricature stereotypes, and the awful soundtrack makes it clear that the film is not attempting to scare, but just desperately trying and failing to be edgy. It's also strange revisiting this film after the Slenderman phenomenon and subsequent Wisconsin 'Slenderman stabbing' in 2014. It shows how reality can certainly be just as strange as fiction and that what Book of Shadows was going for is completely grounded in reality despite all of its adsurdities.
Despite carrying the Blair Witch name it’s very clear why it is the subtitle of the film, because Book of Shadows is not a Blair Witch film, no matter how hard it tries to be. It doesn’t matter how desperately it tries to cling to popular iconography of the original film, it takes all the good ideas put forward by the director and squanders them in a film that is barely coherent as a final product, and goes out of its way to be nothing like the original film in the worst possible way. But it does serve as a warning about letting social paranoias take hold of the mentally vulnerable. If you’ve never seen the film, it’s probably best to keep it that way.