Editorials

The Missing Greatness of ‘Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2’

October 6th, 2023 | By CK Kimball

Joe Berlinger’s one and only horror film, 2000’s Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, had everything against it before its predecessor had even been released to VHS. It was an odd sequel, rushed into production despite the resistance of co-writers, directors, and editors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. Contemporary reviews suggest an incomprehensible plot and an aggressive separation from the found footage element that set The Blair Witch Project apart in the first place. But the failure of Book of Shadows can mostly be traced back to the futile attempt to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle success of the original. What media commentary Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 offered becomes a greater missed opportunity in storytelling with the passage of each social-media-soaked year.

The Blair Witch Project is an indie film fairy tale; it was the low-budget Hail Mary that became a cultural zeitgeist. It wasn’t the first found footage horror movie – that honor goes to the infamous Cannibal Holocaust – but The Blair Witch Project became the poster child for the found footage sub-genre, paving the way for future franchises like Paranormal Activity. The sequel to The Blair Witch Project could have set the tone for the genre it had popularized, taking its experimental spirit in new directions.

But nobody was ready for Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.

For the original film, co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez developed an industry-first marketing strategy to make their low-budget horror project as convincingly real as possible before it even hit the screen. In addition to hiding the actors from the public and producing a fake documentary on the Sci-Fi Channel, they created a website for the “legend” of the Blair Witch, including police reels and “evidence,” and planted comments in online chat rooms. In short, The Blair Witch Project was the first internet-based marketing campaign for a film.

Book of Shadows was rushed into production with the challenge of recreating a horror experience now familiar to audiences. Haxan Films, the production company behind The Blair Witch Project, was hesitant to start a sequel on the back of the first and repeating the trope too soon. So Artisan cut out Haxan and hired director and known crime documentarian Joe Berlinger.

As a journalist, Joe Berlinger had complicated feelings about the first film’s success. In subsequent interviews, he shared his concerns that bad cinematography could be equated with being believable and blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Furthermore, he was increasingly concerned about the decline in the quality of journalism in the United States. However, Berlinger was also inspired by the lazy consumption of media that had made it so easy for the public to accept anything shot on video as real in the first place. 

Berlinger worked with Artisan to fast-track a Blair Witch sequel that was satirical and commented on the frenzy the original film had whipped up. Book of Shadows is meta. Both the movie The Blair Witch Project and its marketing ploys exist in Book of Shadows. Meanwhile, the shaky cam style of the predecessor was left behind for a more conventional Hollywood aesthetic.

Like The Blair Witch Project, the Book of Shadows protagonists share a first name with their actor counterparts. Jeff (Jeffrey Donovan) leads a tour group that includes goth psychic Kim (Kim Director), Wiccan Erica (Erica Leerhsen), and graduate students of mythology and mass hysteria – as well as “do they even like each other?” couple, Stephen and Tristen (Stephen Barker Turner and Tristine Skyler) – into the woods of Burkittsville to locations from the Blair Witch Project film. They camp overnight on the alleged ruins of Blair Witch hermit Rustin Parr’s cabin where, after a night of good old-fashioned hedonism, the fictional supernatural elements of the Blair Witch film begin to bleed into the tour group’s “real” life.

Though Berlinger was turned off by the societal implications of The Blair Witch Project, the director wanted to embrace the reality of video and let the sequel serve as a commentary on the original film. As such, in Book of Shadows, scenes were decontextualized throughout the movie with the use of videotape. For example, Jeff films Tristen taunting the group to kill her, but when the tape is played back for him, the scene is far different from what he recorded and what the audience saw.

This was by design. The audience was supposed to doubt themselves to illustrate how the perception of what’s true can be twisted in media. By 2010, reality TV would be its own genre, and by 2020, the term “fake news” would become a common phrase aimed at media outlets by the general public. But in 2000, reality TV mainly consisted of candid camera shows and MTV’s The Real World. Berlinger was working with concepts that, at that time, were mostly hypothetical.

Joe Berlinger wrote the Book of Shadows script in two months and completed filming in three. He was working on the score for a locked picture when the project was unraveled by the very thing that had made the original film a box office hit: marketing.

“The film we wrapped is a film I was excited about and proud of,” Berlinger told Yahoo! Entertainment in 2020. “It wasn’t until the twelfth hour that some new executive came in and decided they wanted a traditional horror movie – that’s when the nightmare started.”

Berlinger’s cut was meant to be a subtle exploration of shared psychosis inspired by fanaticism. His cut would have been linear, following the group as they spun out, eventually revealing to them and the audience that there was no Blair Witch at all. It was all their own shared hysteria. But Artisan insisted on a re-edit, and the released cut is a more straightforward horror movie. Many elements – including the mental institution scenes and the opening Marilyn Manson track – were insisted on by Artisan post Berlinger’s completion of the film.

And yet, despite desiring a more traditional horror film, Artisan attempted a similar marketing scheme with Book of Shadows as was successful for The Blair Witch Project. Again, a website with fabricated police reports, another Sci-Fi Channel pseudo-documentary, an exclusive Yahoo! release of the teaser, and a cyber-convention ahead of the film dubbed the Blair Witch Webfest. Evidence of this Webfest has all but disappeared. The distribution of the VHS and DVD also included the “Secret of ESREVER” feature, which invited users to replay scenes for clues they could decipher via the website. This feature has also all but disappeared.

In hindsight, there was a lot of potential in the commentary of Joe Berlinger’s original vision. It just wasn’t the right time. But the bastard child of the Blair Witch franchise is worth a rewatch, at least to bask in the naiveté that its themes of “twisted reality” were deemed “too ambiguous and intelligent” for contemporary audiences. And in the years that followed, those same audiences would go on to make “twisted reality” concepts like Jackass, Cheaters, American Idol, The Simple Life, The Bachelor, and Survivor some of the most lucrative in television history.