20 Years Later: BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH 2 Doesn’t Deserve the Hate
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was universally panned by fans of the original as well as critics upon its initial release in 2000. And 20 years later, not much has changed. The flick was ripped apart by some viewers for deviating from the found footage style that made the first feature so immersive. And others took issue with the decidedly different course the sequel’s storyline followed. Many moviegoers were hoping to find a new documentary crew returning to Burkittsville to look for Heather Donahue. But if you recall back to 2016, we got precisely that and (by my estimation) it was more than a little underwhelming.
Synopsis:
As it follows the twisted path traveled by five people fixated on The Blair Witch Project, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 journeys into a dark and dangerous place where the line between truth and fiction blurs and perhaps vanishes altogether. Individual perception grows increasingly untrustworthy as the film’s protagonists find themselves caught in a vortex of unspeakable evil, the origins of which — human or supernatural — remain chillingly uncertain.
I’m not here to tell you that Book of Shadows is a brilliant sequel that got everything right and should be celebrated by fans and critics alike. But I am here to make a case for why it doesn’t deserve all the hate it gets.
Co-writer and director Joe Berlinger (Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills) took a risk by straying from what people loved about the first film and he deserves a bit of credit for opting to tell a very different story that pays a certain amount of homage to the original but consciously and deliberately distances itself from its predecessor.
On the topic of deviating from the original, Berlinger’s decision to present the bulk of the film cinematically was definitely unexpected. He opens the picture with a mini-documentary that may lead the viewer to think they are in for another round of documentary filmmaking in Burkittsville. But our expectations are quickly subverted as the doc comes to an end and the opening credits roll.
I’m certainly not against found footage as a storytelling method if it furthers the narrative. But I believe that making a clean break from the first film was the only way to move the franchise forward without getting stuck in a rut that explored familiar territory. Going the route of following a film crew getting lost in the woods of Maryland as they run afoul of the titular witch for the second time would have been dull at best.
Not only did Berlinger and co-writer Dick Beebe differentiate Book of Shadows from the original, but they also broke from the overly-referential trend that a lot of the post-Scream flicks were so keen to ape. Book of Shadows is meta but not in a “cram as many horror references into a single sentence as possible” kind of way. Book of Shadows is meta in that it’s a movie about a movie. But it isn’t packed with nearly as much of the self-aware commentary many of us had come to expect by the year 2000. And that was a bold choice for the time.
Instead of witty quips and callbacks to classic horror, the flick gave us the tale of four die-hard fans of The Blair With Project on an extensive tour of Burkittsville. The tourists at the center of the tale may be harboring some dark secrets or they may have come into contact with true evil while visiting the quaint town.
The film takes deliberate strides to keep the viewer guessing and leave them with a sense of ambiguity when the credits roll. We are meant to wonder if Jeffrey, Tristen, Stephen, Erica, and Kim were responsible for the deaths of the other tourist group they encounter. And we are meant to question if the characters that survive the film were influenced by the spirit of The Blair Witch or if they were part of a grandiose group delusion.
A case can be made for either scenario but some of what has made the film stick with me after all these years is that you never get a definitive answer. Were the would-be protagonists actually blood-thirsty killers or were they under the influence of an ancient evil that guided their actions?
Similar to the original film, Book of Shadows leaves us with more questions than answers. It could have been a backstory-laden outing that answered all of our questions. But it wasn’t. Part of what makes The Blair Witch Project so haunting is the unknown and the sequel was right to lean into the ambiguity and never truly reveal whether the events taking place are the result of an unhealthy obsession with a fictional feature film or if there is truth to the legend of The Blair Witch.
Book of Shadows doesn’t always hit it out of the park but co-writer and director Joe Berlinger certainly deserves credit for doing something unexpected and different. Especially with Artisan Entertainment demanding a recut and extensive reshoots to bend the film closer to the vision they had in mind. The flash-forward sequences and the cuts to the murders of the tourists were edited in at the request of the studio.
Book of Shadows probably would have maintained a greater mystique if it had gone with the director’s original inclination instead of serving up clues that spoil the ending mere moments into its runtime. Although we’ll probably never see it, I would be interested to check out Berlinger’s director’s cut at some point.
The flash-forward sequences are not the only thing about the picture that doesn’t work. The acting is frequently questionable, the storyline is more than a little discombobulated, and the soundtrack can only be described as a product of its time. But I set out with the intent of defending the film, not piling on with the criticism. So, if you haven’t seen it since theaters, consider giving Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 another chance and try to look past some of its flaws to the film it almost could have been.
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