After its release in 1999, the impactful arrival of The Blair Witch Project meant that its minimalist, lost in the woods, camcorder shot, hellscape became different things to different people.
To some (including me) it was a bold attempt to put an audience directly in the middle of a familiar, horror scenario which then shot through the roof with one of the most ingenious, game changing, viral ad campaigns of the twentieth century. To others it was a frustrating case of all blow, no show, with the imagined terrors that were being visually omitted by grainy production values and handheld camerawork not having the slightest effect on a more jaded viewer. However, whatever side of Rustin Parr’s fence you were on, everyone probably agreed on one thing, The Blair Witch Project wasn’t the sort of horror venture you could turn into a cash cow like a Nightmare On Elm Street or a Scream. Pity the studio didn’t realise that…
It’s November, 1999 and fans of horror phenomenon, The Blair Witch Project, have flooded to Burkittsville, Maryland in order to scour the woods to try and find out if all that witch in the woods stuff is actually real much to the annoyance of the local law enforcement and residences.
One person who has taken full advantage of the craze is ex-psychiatric patient and super fan Jeff, who, aside from selling homemade merch online, has started up his own tour which visits the locations seen in the film and is dubbed The Blair Witch Hunt. For his inaugural trip, he’s joined by Stephen and his pregnant girlfriend Tristen who are a pair of graduate students researching mythology and its effect on mass hysteria; practicing Wiccen Erica and Kim, a goth who claims to have psychic abilities and all four prove to be just as annoying as they sound.
However, after a small run-in with a rival tour group the night before, this quintet of self important jerks awake the next morning having suddenly lost 5 hours of their lives (no big loss) to find that their camp has been wrecked, Jeff cameras smashed and all of Stephen and Tristan’s research shredded into strips and thrown around the area like snow. However, all of this falls into insignificance when it’s discovered that Tristen has miscarried and the group, deeply unsettled, start trawling through the recovered tapes to try and piece together what actually happened while they were all the opposite of compos mentis but while they do, they all start experiencing hallucinations based around the legend of the Blair Witch and suffering conflicting memories about the events that are occuring right in front of them. Paranoia rules and rationality drools as these fans of the hit horror phenomenon find that the movie is now hitting uncomfortably close to home.
I’m sure that somewhere, deep, deep in the woods of Burkittsville, there is a nugget of genius lodged in the slap dash turd the Blair Witch sequel ultimately became, but upon watching Book Of Shadows, it’s as unlocatable as the remains of the movie versions of Heather, Josh and Mike. However, credit where it’s due – at least the original pitch for the film was shooting for something different as documentary filmmaker Joseph Berlinger was hired to make a movie that sequelizes a movie pretending to be a documentary. Fully intended to be a psychologically searing meditation on mass hysteria caused by movie worship (“If you don’t believe in the Blair Witch, then why did you bother to come,”, “I thought the movie was cool.” is one such line) and a condemnation of the fact that most people will believe footage of anything as long as it’s shot on video (Jeff confidently states”video never lies!” at one point). However, the studio wanted something a bit more marketable and ordered re-edits and new footage to be shot which ultimately lead Book Of Shadows to becoming the exact type of glossy horror flick the original movie was created to combat.
Personally, however, I truly believe the movie to be one of the most misguided sequels ever shot as it busts out such weather-beaten horror tropes as spectacularly unlikable characters, lazy jump scares and a complete misunderstanding of everything that made the first film so effective.
The cast (featuring future Burn Notice lead, Jeffrey Donovan) is game, but the second Stephen and Tristen start busting out such self indulgent shite as “Perception is reality” or accusing each other of being “monomaniacal reductionist”, you start to wonder if whatever malevolent evil that’s about to befall them could possibly clock in early for its shift. The other characters are made up of the type of people that society in the year 2000 would tend to be suspicious of; Erica is a Wiccan upset about the negative publicity Blair Witch has cast on her beliefs, Kim’s goth makeup marks her out as a natural outsider and paranoid Jeff has had issues with his mental health. All are excuses for the movie to achieve what the characters want – understanding from the world in general – but it’s tough to care when all they do is sit around whining that there’s no beer and talk to each other like shit.
The tone is slow, the story is garbled by random flashes of violence and police interview footage set at the end of the film awkwardly interspersed throughout the narrative seemingly without any rhyme or reason; however, Book Of Shadows’ greatest crime (apart from not actually including anything actually called The Book Of Shadows) is that it simply isn’t scary at all. As the characters take turns at screaming at each other or uttering traumatised nonsense, the movie refuses to stir up even a single iota of tension and not even the slightest hint of fear, something that is utterly inexcusable in a Blair Witch sequel. Hell, that’s like doing an Elm Street sequel with no fucking nightmares in it.
When the twisty denouement comes (probably around twenty minutes after you’ve already predicted it), you’re left sitting in the remainder of what happens when you try and force the round peg a pop culture phenomenon into the square hole of a marketable brand which seems to we willing to sacrifice any and all originality by fumbling its post modern stylings for having a banging soundtrack album. I mean, I like Dragula by Rob Zombie too, I’m just not sure it was the right choice for a follow up for the most stripped back movie of the nineties.
The Blair Witch is a force of unknowable malevolence that may not even be real – in that respect, Book Of Shadows should’ve taken notes and chosen not to exist.
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