“The following is a fictionalized reenactment of events that occurred after the release of The Blair Witch Project,” reads the intro to Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. “It is based on public records, local Maryland TV broadcasts, and hundreds of hours of taped interviews. To protect the privacy of certain individuals, some names have been changed.”
The film then jumps right into real news and talk-show clips (MTV’s Kurt Loder, Jay Leno, Roger Ebert) discussing The Blair Witch Project around the time of its sensational summer 1999 release. Thanks to the film’s clever marketing, some audience members believed its documentary-style footage was real, following a trio of filmmakers who get lost in the woods outside Burkittsville, Maryland, while investigating a witchy local legend.
As fans soon realized, The Blair Witch Project was a complete work of fiction that nonetheless felt eerily raw and real—a quality that the countless found-footage horror movies that released in its wake tried to recapture, with varied results. Though the Blair Witch characters are famously “never seen again” once their cameras stop rolling, it was inevitable that the original would get a sequel.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 takes place in a world where The Blair Witch Project was a smash hit and has subsequently lured curiosity-seekers to Burkittsville, where the locals are divided on whether all the attention is tiresome or a way to make a quick buck. It also puts forth the idea that while The Blair Witch Project wasn’t a real documentary, the legend of the Blair Witch might have some truth to it.
Jeffrey Donovan as “Jeff,” area kook. © Artisan EntertainmentSome of this reflects real life to a certain extent, but despite that “fictionalized reenactment of events that occurred” scene-setting, Book of Shadows is quite clearly fictional, full stop. It follows a Blair Witch-themed tour group that has a strange experience while camping (and partying) in the notorious forest; they then must piece together their foggy recollections using the videotapes that seemingly captured all their overnight activities.
We also get flashbacks to the brutal psychiatric hospital stay endured by Jeff (Jeffrey Donovan), the tour’s leader, as well as flash-forwards to Jeff and others being interrogated by the local cops. Since we’ve also gotten glimpses of people being tied up and stabbed alongside a campfire, we’re primed for gory mayhem.
What we get instead is more of a disjointed supernatural murder mystery. While it’s refreshing that Book of Shadows doesn’t merely attempt a Blair Witch Project rip-off—it would have been very easy to do “film crew goes in search of film crew,” which is exactly what 2016’s Blair Witch did, albeit with some welcome breathing room from the original—it also doesn’t succeed as a puzzled-together attempt at expanding the first film’s mythology.
Hollywood legend has it that nervous studio heads insisted that director and co-writer Joe Berlinger shoehorn more conventional horror elements into Book of Shadows, hoping it would make the much-anticipated sequel more commercial—seemingly forgetting that the original took incredible stylistic risks and still found a huge audience. There are lingering remnants of the themes Berlinger intended to explore more prominently, including digging into the idea of group hysteria as well as what it means to be an unreliable narrator when the narrator is being recorded at all times.
Book of Shadows is fascinated with contradictory depictions of events—key moments change depending on who the storyteller is, as well as what manner of camera was rolling at the time—but unfortunately, those intriguing ideas tend to get buried under the movie’s flaws. While its assemblage of characters is an amusing (if entirely white) cross-section of stereotypes (including a crunchy Wiccan and a surly goth girl), its circa-2000 special effects and alt-rock soundtrack make it feel instantly dated in all the wrong ways.
A portrait of the Blair Witch, as seen in Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. © Artisan EntertainmentYou can look back at Book of Shadows and see why Berlinger, whose only other narrative film is the Ted Bundy tale Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, has steered his career toward actual documentaries. While versions of the truth in documentaries can also be subjective, the genre has far less tolerance for “make it more popcorn-friendly” meddling. When Book of Shadows came out in 2000, Berlinger was midway through his Paradise Lost trilogy focused on the West Memphis Three—a trio of Arkansas teens wrongfully convicted of murder in a case based more on Satanic Panic-spawned rumors than actual evidence. He’s since become one of Netflix’s go-to true crime creators, turning out series on John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Son of Sam, and JonBenét Ramsey, among others.
The pressure placed upon Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 to succeed back in 2000 must have been huge. Surpassing the first film’s box-office haul was unlikely, but you can imagine that someone high up the food chain felt confident about it. Too bad for Berlinger and his more psychological approach; this movie was going to have naked chicks, glitchy ghost kids, flashy gore, Marilyn Manson groaning over the opening credits, and a title that makes no sense, referencing a “Book of Shadows” that sure sounds exciting but never actually appears in the film.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is newly streaming on Shudder, along with The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Blair Witch (2016).
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