“Burkittsville isn’t a haunted place.”
There’s a curious phenomena that seems to mainly affect the horror genre: movies that don’t need (or warrant) sequels being given them anyway. It’s not solely found in horror; there will be Fast & Furious movies made until the sun goes dark, because the world will never run out of idiots. But something I’ve found is that the less necessary a sequel, the more insane it will be. Look no further than A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, or Halloween III: Season of the Witch. The Blair Witch Project ended in such an unsettling, ambiguous fashion that a sequel seemed both foolhardy and inevitable. But a fascinating part of this process is when a property ends up in the hands of someone who wants nothing to do with it. There are the aforementioned Nightmare and Halloween films, and there is also Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. To give you a taste of how little this movie cares for its predecessor, I offer you this: we never see the Book of Shadows.
For Blair Witch 2, Artisan Entertainment made an unorthodox choice in the director. They tapped Joe Berlinger, most famous for co-directing (with Bruce Sinofsky) the Paradise Lost documentaries, about the wrongfully accused West Memphis Three. Book of Shadows came out twelve years before the exoneration of the accused, and therefore Berlinger has less interest in the legends of Maryland and more interest in the perverse way small-town prejudices can influence justice. He’s not exactly successful in this regard (in fact, one could argue that the film ends up arguing the opposite point), but there are a few times – a very few – when Book of Shadows seems to have more on its mind than the legend at its core.
The premise is, at the very least, a novel approach to the story. Book of Shadows takes place in a world where The Blair Witch Project exists as a movie; people have seen it, and have become obsessed with it. The documentary-style opening is the best part of the movie, most likely because Berlinger is a terrifically talented documentarian. We see how the first film’s success has impacted the town of Burkittsville, which is now awash with tourists (in one amusing shot, we see a crowd of goths milling around in the cemetery). Unfortunately, the movie takes a steep nosedive after this. It’s not just bad – parts of it are downright embarrassing.
Jeff (Jeffrey Donovan of Burn Notice, the only actor to escape with a career) is taking a group of curious tourists on a tour of the woods. There is a couple, Stephen and Tristen, researching a book they’re writing about the Blair Witch; a Wiccan, Erica, who never stops talking about being a Wiccan; and a goth girl, Kim, who wears such heavy white makeup she could be in a Norwegian black metal band. In the first of many cringeworthy shots, we’re introduced to Kim as she relaxes on a gravestone, smoking a cigarette. They run the gamut from annoying (Erica) to bland (Stephen and Tristen). Jeff is watchable by virtue of being Jeffrey Donovan, and Kim at least stands out visually.
To be fair, there are some small touches that I appreciated. For one, the characters all have the same name as the actor playing them, which lends a much-needed sense of verisimilitude. I also liked that upon seeing their campground, a character refers to it as the spot where “Heather’s footage was found” (referring to BWP‘s Heather Donahue). As you can imagine, things go awry almost immediately. Shockingly, their plan to stay up all night by drinking beer and whiskey fails them, and when they awake, they find ruin: the book research has been shredded, Jeff’s cameras destroyed. The tapes are still intact, though, hidden in the same spot where Heather Donahue’s tapes were found. Tristen starts breaking down and has a miscarriage because of the stress. She wants to leave, and the group bucks horror movie convention by actually doing so. They reconnoiter at Jeff’s house, which, as you’ve probably guessed, is a massive former glue factory that he bought from the county for one dollar.
So much of Book of Shadows is so performatively edgy that it is genuinely painful to watch. The idea of “cool,” “edgy,” “unique,” or “counterculture” shifts so rapidly that by the time something like this comes out, the Overton window has shifted to something drastically different, so even in 2000, this must have looked hopelessly dated. Kim’s wardrobe is so hokey that it looks like an Emily the Strange cartoon come to embarrassing life, or a drawing out of a tract warning parents post-Columbine to shield their children from the horrors of heavy metal. Erica is someone who no one could stand to be around for more than thirty seconds in the real world. Stephen and Tristen are as bland as characters get, down to their wardrobes (think a lot of shapeless sweaters). Jeff, with his goatee and jean shorts, looks like he’s either on his way to or from a Limp Bizkit concert. Either way, Limp Bizkit is involved.
The plot is rote and predictable. Several characters intone, “We brought something back with us,” which the audience has already long since figured out. From there, the movie gets increasingly repetitive and muddled. It’s just hallucination after hallucination, and no one seems that bothered by it. They all have some pagan runes carved into their bodies, but they don’t seem worried. The hallucinations are dismissed as quickly as they come; beyond not being scary, there’s a sense of diminishing returns, as the visions round the corner into laughable. It’s also dull, as we know we can’t trust anything we see or hear, so watching the characters fall prey to a distorted reality, again and again, just becomes tiresome.
Where the film (marginally) succeeds is in Berlinger’s focus on the persecution of the other. These scenes are as ham-fisted and laughable as the rest, but you can tell this is the part of the story that Bergliner actually cares about. Jeff is hounded by Sheriff Cravens, who is looking to convict him of any crime, just to get him off the streets. Cravens targets Jeff because of his fascination with the Blair Witch, and his history of mental health. Unfortunately, what could be an interesting dynamic is hampered by Larry Flaherty’s broad, campy performance. It’s the worst performance in a movie full of bad ones. He doesn’t even pretend towards impartiality, and Flaherty plays Cravens like he’s Boss Hogg, speaking in a thick Southern drawl that no one else has. Late in the film, Kim is subject to some catcalling and anti-goth prejudice which turns into violence. The scene is over the top and silly, but there’s a hint of pathos to it. One imagines that Berlinger sees something of Damien Echols (the despised “ringleader” of the West Memphis Three) in Kim.
Like most bad movies, Book of Shadows is ripe for a re-evaluation, scores of think-pieces by critics starved for content and addicted to contrarianism and the attention that it brings. (These are the same people now insisting that Batman & Robin is, in fact, good.) Book of Shadows is not good. But it is, in a few scenes, interesting. At one point, Jeff says, “Video never lies; film does, though,” and that’s as close as the film gets to exploring its central question: how much can you trust or believe what you’re told? It’s clearly a conflict close to Berlinger’s heart, and if nothing else, you have to admire the strange way he went about exploring it.
10/1: Hellraiser / The Invitation
10/2: Splice / Banshee Chapter
10/3: Jennifer’s Body / Raw
10/4: Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist / Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
10/5: Kill List / A Field in England
10/6: Halloween II / Halloween III: Season of the Witch
10/7: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge / A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
10/8: Ginger Snaps / Creep
10/9: Cube / Creep 2
10/10: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) / The Ritual
10/11: Hell House LLC / The Taking of Deborah Logan
10/12: Re-Animator / From Beyond
10/13: Beetlejuice / Sleepy Hollow
10/14: Idle Hands / The Lords of Salem
10/15: The Ring / Noroi: The Curse
10/16: I Know What You Did Last Summer / The Monster
10/17: Night of the Living Dead / Train to Busan
10/18: The Devil’s Backbone / Southbound
10/19: Event Horizon / Dreamcatcher
10/20: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari / The Bad Seed
10/21: Eyes Without a Face / Goodnight Mommy
10/22: The Strangers / The Strangers: Prey at Night
10/23: In the Mouth of Madness / The Void
10/24: The Amityville Horror / Honeymoon
10/25: Gerald’s Game / Emelie
10/26: The Monster Squad / Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
10/27: Veronica / Jacob’s Ladder
10/28: High Tension / You’re Next
10/29: The Innkeepers / Bug
10/30: The People Under the Stairs / Vampires
10/31: Saw / Saw II
About Author
