Blair Witch 2

''Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2'' is a 2000 American metafiction horror film directed and co-written by Joe Berlinger and starring Jeffrey Donovan, Stephen Barker Turner, Kim Director, Erica Leerhsen, and Tristine Skyler. Its plot revolves around a group of people fascinated by the mythology surrounding the film ''The Blair Witch Project''; they go into the Black Hills where the original film was shot and experience supernatural phenomena and psychological unraveling.

Originally conceived by Berlinger and co-writer Dick Beebe as a psychological thriller and meditation on mass hysteria, ''Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2'' was significantly altered in postproduction, which Berlinger would later claim compromised his original vision. Among the changes were a new soundtrack, additional editing, and the integration of entirely new sequences.

The film was released in theaters in North America and the United Kingdom on October 27, 2000. It received negative reviews from critics but was a financial success, grossing $47 million worldwide against its $15 million budget.

Plot

The film is contextualized in the beginning blocks of text as a dramatic reenactment of events that occurred after ''The Blair Witch Project'' was released into theaters.

In November 1999, tourists and fans of ''The Blair Witch Project'' descend on the small town of Burkittsville, Maryland, where the film was set. Local resident Jeff, a former psychiatric patient and obsessed fan, orchestrates a group tour of locations featured in the film. Among the group are graduate students Stephen and his pregnant girlfriend, Tristen, who are researching mythology and mass hysteria; Erica, the Wiccan daughter of an Episcopal minister; and Kim, a goth with psychic proclivities. They camp for the night in the ruins of Rustin Parr's house, where Jeff has placed surveillance cameras, hoping to capture supernatural occurrences. Jeff becomes unnerved when he notices a large tree located in the center of the house's foundation, claiming it was not there before. That night, another tour group arrives to camp at the ruins, but they are misdirected to Coffin Rock by Jeff and Stephen.

After drinking and smoking marijuana all night, the group awakens in the morning to find Stephen and Tristen's research documents shredded and strewn through the woods and Jeff's cameras destroyed; his damaged tapes are uncovered beneath the house's foundation, the same spot the ''Blair Witch Project'' tapes were found in 1995. Tristen suffers a miscarriage, and they rush her to the Burkittsville hospital. In her hospital room, Tristen sees a young girl walking backward. After she is discharged, the group retreats to Jeff's home, an industrial building that was once a factory. While Tristen rests, the group reviews Jeff's tapes, which uncover an image of Erica circling around a tree, nude. Distraught, Erica claims she has no memory of such an event and goes to pray in another room. When Kim tries to console her, Erica reveals rash-like symbols covering her body and proclaims the group has been marked for death.

Kim borrows Jeff's van to pick up coffee and alcohol in town. At the country store, she gets into an argument with the cashier. While driving away, she swerves to avoid a group of children in the road and crashes the van into a tree, denting the fender. The children disappear when she exits the van. Later, Kim finds a bloody nail file stuck among the bottles of beer she purchased. The following morning, Jeff looks outside and sees the front end of his van entirely caved in, to the point that it is undrivable; Kim insists that the accident was minor. The group realizes Erica is absent and searches the house. They attempt to call her father at his office but are told by his secretary that he has no children.

Meanwhile, Tristen's disposition grows increasingly bizarre. The county sheriff, Cravens, calls Jeff, informing him the other tour group was found disemboweled on Coffin Rock, and threatens him. Later, while searching through a drawer, Kim finds a set of surveillance dossiers on herself and the others. She confronts Jeff, but he denies knowing the source of them. Shortly after, the group discovers Erica's corpse in a closet.

Tristen begins chanting about widdershins and speaking backward; this leads Kim to suggest they play Jeff's tapes in reverse. Upon doing so, they find the footage shows the high and drunken group descending into a demonic ritual and frenzied orgy led by Tristen, culminating in the murder of the other tour group at Coffin Rock. When they confront Tristen, she alternately pleads and goads them. Jeff, convinced Tristen is possessed by the Blair Witch, begins filming the confrontation, attempting to elicit a confession for Erica's death. The three follow Tristen to the second floor, where she ties a rope around her neck and taunts Stephen, daring him to push her. In a fit of rage, he pushes her over the balcony, killing her.

Later, Jeff, Stephen, and Kim are arrested and interrogated by police. Each claim that a possessed Tristen was responsible. Their accounts are contradicted by various video footage: Security cameras captured Kim murdering the store cashier with her own nail file, while Jeff's home monitors show him, nude, hiding Erica's body in the closet; the DV footage Jeff filmed during Tristen's confrontation shows her pleading for her life as they accuse her of being a witch, ending in Stephen mercilessly pushing her to her death. Meanwhile, as Jeff, Kim, and Stephen are shown this footage by police, funeral mourners arrive in the woods to remember the other tour group that was murdered.

Cast

Production

Development

After the massive success of ''The Blair Witch Project'', Artisan was eager to produce a sequel while the film's popularity was still at its peak. However, Haxan Films, who created the original film, was not ready to begin work on a follow-up, preferring to wait until the initial buzz had died down. In December 1999, Artisan decided to proceed without them, hiring Joe Berlinger, known for his work on true crime documentaries (this was his first and last narrative film for nineteen years), to direct.

While developing the screenplay, Berlinger spent time in the real town of Burkittsville (the setting of ''The Blair Witch Project'') undertaking research and interviewing locals on how the release of the film had impacted their lives. Many of the individuals Berlinger interviewed served as direct inspirations for the characters featured in the film. His core theme when composing the screenplay with Dick Beebe was that the evil attributed to the Blair Witch may "be human in origin as opposed to supernatural". According to Berlinger, the character of Erica represented an aspect of this, specifically the frustrations that the Wiccan community voiced after the release of ''The Blair Witch Project'', which some felt misconstrued the tenets of Wicca and showed their religion in a negative light.

Berlinger was also inspired by the "lazy consumption of media" that led many to accept ''The Blair Witch Project'' as a true documentary; specifically, "how readily he public iswilling to accept that something shot on video is real". He elaborated: "On one hand, ''Blair Witch 2'' works as a standard horror movie...but it also is a meditation on violence in the media, and the nature of fanaticism and obsession...and the dangers of blurring the lines between reality and fiction". Additionally, Berlinger incorporated elements of real-life subjects and places featured in his 1996 true crime documentary '' Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills'', as well as narrative components of the stage play ''Six Characters in Search of an Author'' by Luigi Pirandello.

Casting

Berlinger based his casting decisions largely on group chemistry between the actors, as the film was anchored exclusively in their collective experience. The casting period, according to Berlinger, only lasted for six weeks, in New York City. Originally, Tristine Skyler auditioned for the role played by Erica Leerhsen, while Leerhsen auditioned for the role played by Kim Director. Upon casting Leerhsen, who in reality was a short-haired blonde, Berlinger fitted her with hair extensions and had her hair dyed red for the part. Jeffrey Donovan had also originally auditioned for the role played by Stephen Barker Turner, but Berlinger felt him a better fit for the leader of the group.

Filming

The majority of the film was shot over a period of 44 days in the spring of 2000 on location outside of Baltimore, Maryland. The exposition scenes featuring the characters camping were shot in Gwynns Falls Leakin Park, and the stone ruins of the Rustin Parr house were constructed out of styrofoam. The scene featuring Tristen in the hospital was shot at an abandoned sanitarium in Baltimore. Jeff's loft house in the film is actually the Clipper Mill, located on the edge of Baltimore. The documentary footage that opens the film features interviews from real residents of Burkittsville, Maryland.

Because the original film had been parodied so much since its release, Berlinger deliberately avoided using any shaky camerawork and "the tylisticclichés of bad documentary filmmaking", opting to maintain an aesthetic at odds with the documentary form.

Post-production

Stylistically, ''Book of Shadows'' was the direct opposite of its predecessor: though the film occasionally utilizes the point of view camcorder/pseudo-documentary format used in the first movie, ''Book of Shadows'' more closely resembles the glossy, big-budget special effects-laden horror films that ''Blair Witch'' was a counter to. Berlinger has stated that he originally made the film with more of an ambiguous tone that focused on the characters' psychological unraveling after their night spent in the Black Hills, but Artisan forced him to re-cut the film and re-shoot certain scenes to add more "traditional" horror movie elements, thus creating what they saw as a more "commercial" film. Namely, the footage of the main characters murdering the foreign tourists was shot in Berlinger's backyard mere weeks prior to the film's release date, and was incorporated in the film as flash cuts to add more visual violence. Furthermore, expository footage showing Jeff in a psychiatric hospital was also shot at the request of Artisan executives; these scenes were filmed at the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Randall's Island in New York City. Berlinger later stated that he felt the gory sequences incorporated into the film "fought against the ambiguity etried to nurture".

Additionally, the interrogation sequences which are intercut throughout the film were, per Berlinger's director's cut, arranged as a single eight-minute-long sequence bookending the film. Instead, the studio requested Berlinger cut the sequence into isolated vignettes and intercut them throughout the film. This compromised Berlinger's original vision of a "linear" narrative that begins "as a lighthearted romp in the woods...almost as a spoof of the lair Witchphenomenon" before descending into a "downward spiral".

The original cut of the film also featured Frank Sinatra's "Witchcraft" during the opening credits, but was replaced by the studio with "Disposable Teens" by Marilyn Manson.

Multiple fan edits have since attempted to reconstruct Berlinger's original vision.

Score and soundtrack

Release

Marketing

Though ''Book of Shadows marketing campaign made no attempt to present the film as a "true story", a promotional "dossier" for the film, compiled by D.A. Stern, was released, including fabricated police reports and interviews surrounding the events in the film as if they were fact (a similar "dossier", also by Stern, was released as a companion piece to the first film). Additionally, similar to the first movie, each of the main characters retain the first names of their respective actors, though their surnames are changed slightly.

On September 29, 2000, the film's teaser trailer was released on the internet, available for streaming exclusively on ''Yahoo!''. The trailer shows a half-naked woman with a twana symbol behind her back, discovering Book of Shadows in the woods, before she is attacked by an unknown man.

Beginning on October 18, a three-day online "Blair Witch Webfest" was launched, which included involvement from artist Marilyn Manson, whose music was featured on the film's soundtrack. The cyber-convention included a contest whose grand prize winner received tickets to the opening of Manson's tour in Minneapolis, as well as a private screening of ''Book of Shadows'' with Manson in attendance.

On October 22, the Sci-Fi Channel premiered ''Shadow of the Blair Witch'', a pseudo-documentary following ''Book of Shadows''s protagonist, Jeff and others who are transfixed by the Blair Witch phenomenon. The documentary recontextualizes ''Book of Shadows'' as being a Hollywood film based upon actual events that happened in the Blair Witch universe. The fictional documentary charts both the mythology of the Blair Witch alongside Jeff's criminal prosecution for the murders depicted in the film.

Box office

''Book of Shadows'' had its world premiere at the Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles on October 24, 2000. It was released theatrically in on 3,600 screens in six countriesincluding United States, Canada, and the United Kingdomon October 27.

In the United States, the film debuted at number 2 at the box office, earning $13 million during its opening weekend playing on 3,317 screens. After eight weeks, it finished with a total domestic gross of $26,421,314. Overall, internationally the film grossed $47,737,094.

Critical response

Critical reaction to ''Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2'' upon release was generally negative. Internet review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 14% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 108 reviews, with an average rating of 3.37/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "This sequel to ''Blair Witch Project'' is all formula and no creativity, mechanically borrowing elements from the original and other horror movies". Metacritic reported, based on 34 reviews, a weighted average score of 15 out of 100, indicating "overwhelming dislike". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "D−" on an A+ to F scale.

In a review published in ''The Guardian'': "Everything—and I mean everything—that made ''The Blair Witch Project'' a little indie masterpiece has been falsified and trashed in this spectacularly bad sequel". Roger Ebert, who gave the first film four stars (out of four), gave ''Book of Shadows'' two stars, calling it "a muddled, sometimes-atmospheric effort that could have come from many filmmakers" and "not a very lucid piece of filmmaking". Owen Gleiberman of ''Entertainment Weekly'' awarded the film a C−, calling it "a flat heebie jeebies thriller". Kirk Honeycutt of ''The Hollywood Reporter'' wrote that the film is "better made than the original, and its writing contains a subtlety and wit the original film lacked". Anwar Brett of the BBC
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