“The great American pastime. Blame it on the witch.”
— Erica Leerhsen, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
It’s late. I’m tired. I’ve worked all day, dealt with some family stuff, and settled down for my second viewing of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 in three days. It’s not a well-liked movie. Some would call these repeated watches masochistic behavior, and I’m half-inclined to believe them. This kind of giddy exhaustion brings about an acute hyper-awareness, an almost divine sense of nitpickiness. Believe me. I’ve got a lot of snippy little gripes about Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.
But I’ll be dipped in a vat of tepid processed American cheese food if I don’t love this movie.
When The Blair Witch Project was released in 1999, no one expected it to become one of the biggest all-time horror hits. Budgeted at a paltry $60,000, the movie raked in about $248 million worldwide and kicked off a whole sub-genre of found-footage films. With that kind of profit, there was no question that a sequel would be produced, but I don’t think anyone expected what kind of film it would be.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is a meta sequel, a story about people reacting to the original film within an all-new, yet connected, movie in the series. For example, consider Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, which starred Heather Langenkamp as a fictionalized version of herself fighting off a real-world Freddy Krueger. It says something about the public’s disdain for meta sequels that Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is the lowest-grossing entry in the series with $19 million.
I can’t see that stylistic shift as a detriment. The filmmakers’ willingness to do things differently is what makes Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 worth watching. It’s not DIY at all, but rather a piece of slick, colorful filmmaking that flips the bird at the original’s lost film ethos. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is the younger sibling of a genius, so desperate for love and respect that it will do anything to get your attention, even if it is negative. If that means doing terrible shit to a bunch of whiny early Aughts assholes, then by the gods, that is what’s going to happen.
There are plenty of reasons, including the meta movie phobia, why audiences stayed away from Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. Initial buzz was poor. Plenty of hardcore fans were angry that the sequel strayed from the found footage formula. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was a movie movie with a shooting script, decent production values, and a bitchin’ alternative rock soundtrack. It was more than a departure. It was a betrayal of all the things that made The Blair Witch Project a surprise box office and pop culture sensation.
“Video never lies. Film does, though.”
– Jeffrey Donovan, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
In Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, hardcore fans of the original movie travel to the town where it was made (Burkittsville, Maryland) to visit landmarks and filming locations. Our main group of characters serves as the anti-Friends, consisting of a black lace-wearing goth girl (Kim Director), a red-headed Wiccan (Erica Leerhson), a straight-laced couple of researchers (Tristen Skyler and Stephen Barker Turner), and a tour guide (Jeffrey Donovan) who recently underwent treatment at a local mental health facility. After a drunken night of outdoor partying, the group awakens with no memory of the previous night. Their notes are torn up, and their cameras are destroyed. However, the tapes from the prior night’s investigation are unharmed, hidden beneath a cache of rocks.
Meanwhile, in another section of the woods, members of a tour headed by a rival Blair Witch Hunt tour company are found murdered at Coffin Rock, an important location in The Blair Witch Project. Sheriff Cravens (Lanny Flaherty) immediately suspects Jeffrey and his group of visiting misfits of the horrific crime. This accusation leads Jeffrey to review hours and hours of tape from the previous night to prove they were too busy drinking, smoking, and having freaky sex to have killed anyone.
What Jeffrey discovers is footage with missing chunks of time. Ghostly appearances. Someone performs a blurry pole dance around a tree. Meanwhile, unexplained bloody marks begin appearing on everyone’s body. “It’s an ancient pagan language!” Erica says. [Author’s note: It’s not.] Researcher Tristen adds to the wacky fun by having a miscarriage. Kim drinks a lot of Pete’s Wicked Ale. Jeffrey drinks a lot of coffee while staring at the video monitors. Erica lights candles and incessantly invokes the goddess, Persephone, but never asks Persephone to intervene or do anything helpful.
Perhaps all these people are victims of group psychosis, doing awful things they’ve blocked from their memories. They’re searching for video evidence to show the sheriff, and also themselves, that they aren’t capable of the hideous actions they’re accused of performing. Sure, they’re all anxious and sketchy in their own ways. But are they shitty human beings, or have they been influenced by the Blair Witch (who is supposed to be fictional but is now real for some reason)?
Obviously, the answer is “huh?”
There is a sub-genre of film, beloved by some, known as “rubber reality” or “mind fuck” movies. Think Inception or the Matrix movies. Where does the real world begin and end? Is perception reality, or are we part of a simulation? Why are there so many songs about rainbows? We don’t know, and we can’t know for sure.
In Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, we aren’t sure what to believe. For the characters, their video footage is their tether to the truth. What is happening outside the video —the events of the film surrounding those characters —are presented as reality. But if we go by Jeffrey’s belief that film lies, what are we supposed to believe? Where film and video intersect, and how one affects the other, is the crux of the action. Someone, or something, is lying.
When Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 hit the screens, it went over like a dead tree in a windstorm. It only made $47.7 million against a production budget of about $15 million. I’m not saying that it’s time for serious film critics to reevaluate Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 because there are tons of things wrong with the movie. It’s tonally uneven. The dialogue is often terrible, if not unintentionally hilarious. I still can’t figure out why Sheriff Cravens sounds like a Southern Pentecostal preacher when he’s supposed to be from Maryland.
But there’s an unsettling elasticity to Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, a seam-bulging confusion about the nature of reality and the trustworthiness of our visual frames of reference. Can we believe what we see? If we base our actions upon what we see, like the characters in the movie, then the concepts of right and wrong may be more subjective than we think. And if we can’t properly figure out what’s right and wrong, how are we supposed to act?
To me, the big takeaway from Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is that even when we fully believe that we know what we’re doing, we have no clue. We’re all flailing about, making things up as we go, dealing with our demons and ghosts while others hide and watch. Those others don’t want you to know their truth, which is that they’re fumbling their way through life as well.
We’re not all doing the best we can.
Blame it on the witch.
