Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)
The introductory intertitles for Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, the meta sequel to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez's groundbreaking 1999 supernatural horror phenomenon, The Blair Witch Project, read, "The following is a fictionalized reenactment of events that occurred after the release of The Blair Witch Project. It is based on public records, local Maryland TV broadcasts and hundreds of hours of taped interviews. To protect the privacy of certain individuals, some names have been changed."
Right off the bat, co-writers Joe Berlinger (who pulls double duty as director) and Dick Beebe's attempt to replicate the verisimilitude of Myrick and Sanchez's low-budget masterpiece and deceive viewers into believing that what they're about to see is based on factual events is eye-rolling in its transparent phoniness. This isn't the only instance in which the filmmakers borrow liberally from their predecessor, which they must have loved so intensely seeing as they couldn't even wait more than a year before cranking out a sequel: as in the instant-classic original, we have a group of young strangers assembling in the Black Hills Forest of Burkittsville, Maryland to investigate the legend of the infamous Blair Witch, one of whom is equipped with a video camera to document their findings; almost immediately, strange things begin happening, such as the emergence of a large tree that wasn't present prior to the excursion; a gallery of Burkittsville residents are interviewed to lend a documentarian authenticity to the setup; and naturally, the investigating group finds themselves trapped in the woods and under the hallucinatory spell of the vengeful Elly Kedward.
However, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 quickly ventures into a commendably different direction from the original and that of the average run-of-the-mill horror sequel. In the hypothetical case of the latter, Blair Witch 2 would have taken place within the universe established by the original. Following the unexplained disappearances of budding documentarians Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams in the Black Hills Forest, a new group of young documentarians would have gathered in the same woods to investigate their disappearances and fallen prey to a repeat of the witch's supernatural hijinks: mysterious noises in the middle of the night, piles of rocks arranged outside their tents, stick figures strung from trees. Fortunately, Berlinger—making his directorial debut—and Beebe have more ambitious ideas in mind than merely recycling the formula of their inspiration, and they announce that ambition straight out of the gate.
Following the conspicuously cheesy intertitles, Berlinger opens his sequel with a series of talking heads—MTV newscaster Kurt Loder, film critics Roger Ebert and Norman Mark, late-night talk show hosts Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, actor Andy Richter, and genuine residents of Burkittsville, Maryland—who discuss the unprecedented blockbuster success of The Blair Witch Project and, for the townies, the unintended repercussions of the filmmakers' decision to use a real small town as the setting for their fictional, but allegedly factual, mockumentary. The attitudes of both groups are drastically different: the celebrities celebrate Blair Witch as one of the scariest horror films ever crafted, while the residents openly resent that it has cast an aura of evil over their harmless, quaint town, wishing the filmmakers had set their story in a fictional one. What this tactic accomplishes, aside from recreating the documentarian vibe of the original, is establishing The Blair Witch Project as canonical to its own reality. By making The Blair Witch Project a film within a film, Berlinger and Beebe blur the boundary between fiction and reality.
Following his release from a psychiatric hospital, Burkittsville resident Jeffrey Patterson (Jeffrey Donovan) orchestrates a group tour through the Black Hills Forest called "The Blair Witch Hunt." Joining him on his weekend excursion are expectant couple Stephen Ryan Parker (Stephen Barker Turner) and Tristen Ryler (Tristine Skyler), "real-life witch" Erica Geerson (Erica Leerhsen), and goth Kim Diamond (Kim Director). After a night of lighthearted partying and group bonding, the quintet wakes up the next morning to discover Stephen and Tristen's written research shredded to pieces, Jeff's cameras obliterated and his tapes buried beneath the foundation of Rustin Parr's home, and zero recollection of the previous night. In the midst of the panic and disorientation, Tristen suffers a miscarriage, necessitating the others to leave Black Hills and rush her to the nearest hospital.
Aside from hitting a few familiar basic beats—the isolated, wooded setting, the investigation of the Blair Witch's legend, the disappearance of one of the group members, the handheld recording of the leader—the plot concocted by Berlinger and Beebe deviates radically from that of The Blair Witch Project, both narratively and cinematographically. For starters, the filmmakers ditch the found-footage conceit that invigorated the original with a fresh perspective and sense of immediacy in favor of a conventionally filmed narrative feature. Cinematographer Nancy Schreiber pays homage to the documentarian feel of the original by occasionally switching to the perspectives of Jeff's camcorder and surveillance monitors, but for the most part, she presents the story in a standard third-person point of view. While this conventional filmmaking approach lacks the originality and immediacy of Neal Fredericks' handheld shaky camerawork, it serves as a blessing for those afflicted with motion sickness.
Berlinger and Beebe creatively use the events of The Blair Witch Project, its near-universal fandom and obsession, and unresolved debate as to its real-world veracity as a starting point for an exploration of collective hysteria and the razor-thin line between myth and reality, all while retaining Myrick and Sanchez's emphasis on psychological tension, uncertainty, and slow-burning suspense over immediate, concrete answers or prolonged displays of bloodshed. As with Heather and her crew, once paranoia and the loss of control emerge, Jeff and his colleagues cave in to full-throated infighting. Berlinger and Beebe recognize that it isn't the appearance of the witch that provokes horror, so much as it is her influence and the psychological effect she has on her latest group of targets.
Regarding the carnage candy and the apparitions, Berlinger definitely shows more than his predecessors were willing to, satiating the bloodlust of gorehounds with rapid shots of uncomfortably grisly images. Whereas Myrick and Sanchez employed the sounds of children laughing throughout the forest, Berlinger visually depicts the seven ghostly child victims of Rustin Parr. Rather than spoon-feeding answers to their audience all in one serving, Berlinger and Beebe trust enough in our patience to parcel intriguing snippets of information at a time—Erica dancing naked around a tree backwards and lying about being the daughter of an Episcopal minister, Tristen conducting the group in the ritualistic slaughter of a fellow group of tourists, Jeff destroying his own cameras, Stephen and Tristen tearing up their own research for their book—while leaving room for doubt as to the characters' culpability and awareness.
To transfer their characters' disorientation and fragile grip on reality to the viewer, the filmmakers rely on visual and audio hallucinations: a topless Erica reappearing outside Jeff's home, the bridge to his front door collapsing and repairing, the barking of a security system turning into a pack of actual dogs, the sounds of an enraged sheriff screaming at Jeff and pounding on the door, Kim chewing on the neck of a dead owl (that, when alive, had the scariest pair of glaring eyes). The only cliché that Berlinger and Beebe lean a little too hard on is having their characters drink beer and smoke weed in excess to steady their nerves. Then again, on the night before they ventured into the Black Hills Forest, Heather, Mike, and Josh celebrated in a similar manner, but there it felt more organic to their situation.
Berlinger commences his story at a slow pace to absorb us into the atmosphere, establish his quintet of protagonists, and delineate their motivations for putting themselves in a secluded setting where three wannabe documentarians supposedly went missing for real. However, he gathers speed and momentum the next morning, when the characters wake up from their blackout to the sight of papers shredded to pieces that blow in the wind like snowflakes and Jeff's equipment demolished. As they struggle to piece together what happened last night and identify the culprit(s) who vandalized their materials, distrust, unjustified blame, animosity, and paranoia fester and permeate the previously convivial atmosphere.
The quintet of protagonists in Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is composed of thin personalities that can be summarized in one- or two-sentence descriptions. While Heather, Josh, and Mike felt like a trio of authentic young adults with appealing but unglamorous appearances, Jeff, Stephen, Erica, Tristen, and Kim inch closer to Hollywood stereotypes who have the made-up, flattering appearances of cinematic characters. At the very least, they're distinguishable from one another, so no one feels as though they could be interchanged with someone else.
Jeff, the leader of the Blair Witch Hunt, is freshly released from a psychiatric hospital and struggling to maintain a grip on his automatically dubious sanity. A devout fan of The Blair Witch Project—he was still locked up when it premiered, but once released, he watched it 17 times in the theater—Jeff now makes a living selling worthless Blair Witch memorabilia to tourists: rocks, handmade stick figures, Black Hills dirt, twigs. He's also a blatant misogynist who expects any woman around him to become his servant, evinced when he nonchalantly orders Kim to bring him a pot of coffee then doesn't think to say thank you when she obliges. Stephen is a budding author composing a book about the mythology of the Blair Witch and mass hysteria alongside his girlfriend and co-author, Tristen, who's pregnant with Stephen's secretly unwanted baby. Following her miscarriage, Tristen is randomly saddled with nightmares that she intuitively knows belong to Elly Kedward ("Because I'm seeing them through her eyes.") that provide a window into the sadistic extent of her lynching.
With her black outfits, pitch-black hair, streaked with dark blue, vampire-white makeup, black eyeliner, leather studded choker, and maroon lipstick, Kim's get-up visually signifies that she's a goth chick. Moreover, she possesses the selective ability of clairvoyance, able to detect that Tristen is pregnant with a baby only Stephen wants, Jeff was recently let out of a psychiatric hospital, and that Jeff's tapes are buried beneath a pile of rocks (in the same spot Heather's footage was found), but unable to determine what happened to Erica after she disappears.
The most intriguing character is Erica, a Wiccan who subverts the stereotype that her religion is associated with devil worship. A free-spirited hippie, Erica worships nature over the Devil, in whom she doesn't even believe ("That's a Christian concept."), and takes offense to the exploitation of her religion to sell useless knickknacks and perpetuation of harmful stereotypes posited by The Blair Witch Project. She believes in being a good person because whatever you do is destined to come back at you threefold ("Karma's a bitch.") and seeks to commune with the spirit of Elly Kedward, with whom she feels a kinship ("Elly was an Earth child like me."), looking up to her as a mentor. Ronald Cravens (Lanny Flaherty) is the quintessential loudmouthed, hard-assed, redneck sheriff who openly carries a lifelong disdain for Jeff for no delineated reason and salivates for the opportunity to pin a horrid crime on him.
In an instance of a cast breathing more life into their characters than what's written in the screenplay, the quintet of actors at the center of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 delivers phenomenal performances across the board, charting their characters' collective psychological descent into hysteria with complete, powerful conviction. While their surnames are changed, their first names remain intact. Kim Director begins as zen, quiet, and mysterious, introducing herself lying at the base of a gravestone, struggling to summon the will to get up. As the witch's spell begins to take hold, Kim exposes the vulnerability beneath her gothic makeup and composed exterior. Despite the off-putting get-up and vampiric face, Kim reveals herself as a kindhearted and compassionate human being, albeit one unafraid to stand up for herself and assert her right to a purchase of beer, illustrated in an exhilarating, fist-pumping interaction at a grocery store where Kim is refused a pack of beer by Peggy (Kennen Sisco), the judgmental manager. Kim's response to this obvious discrimination is ferociously cathartic.
Prior to her performances in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, Erica Leerhsen made her horror (and film in general) debut in Book of Shadows, and it's obvious to see how her first starring role paved the way for her success as a scream queen. In contrast to Kim's affected solemnity as a goth, Erica is a free spirit, happy-go-lucky and sexy—until a certain incriminating discovery sends her spiraling into a bundle of nerves, praying frantically and tearfully for mercy. In her final scene (excluding a subsequent hallucination), Leerhsen sits at a table, visibly on edge. As she affects casualness, asking Stephen if he slept okay and offering to get the keys from Jeff to drive them home, it's evident that she's withholding an unexpressed anxiety.
The creepiest performance emerges from Tristine Skyler, who oscillates between crippling fear, the guilt of losing a baby she never wanted, lucidity, delusion, catatonia, helplessness, indignancy, and whispery taunting. One minute, she's lying in bed, apologizing through tears for not wanting the baby she knew Stephen desperately wanted; the next, she's standing on the bed, spinning in a circle while manically reciting the grisly details of Elly Kedward's vigilante-style execution, screaming about "the little bastard boys" who visited Elly while she was tied to a tree, let their dogs bite at her, stabbed her with sticks, and pressed their hands into her bloody flesh. In the same one scene, Tristen feigns upset, breaking down into Stephen's arms before suddenly slapping him unprovoked across the face, calmly stating "Tristen's gone." She seems to be aware of the corrosion of her sanity.
In a group of eccentric Blair Witch devotees, Wiccans, goths, and schizophrenics, Stephen Turner emerges as the voice of reason, levelheaded and always searching for a rational explanation to even the most irrational events. He isn't carrying any psychological baggage, apart from the recent loss of his first child, but he's torn between his love for and loyalty to Tristen and his growing fear of her as she spins further out of control and into delirium. In their final scene together, in which Tristen ties a noose around her own neck and taunts Stephen to push her over the second-floor railing, Turner's face vibrates with rapidly mounting homicidal rage. After making the worst impulsive decision of his life, his eyes well with tears and his voice cracks as he desperately proclaims his innocence and remorse.
To incorporate more visual violence than the original and prime viewers for the horror to come, editor Sarah Flack intersperses the present story with intermittent fast cuts to the ritualistic slaughter of the adversarial tour group at Coffin Rock: close-ups of unidentified assailants stabbing, disemboweling, throat-slashing the tourists, tying rope around a shirtless male body, smashing a beer bottle over an Asian woman's head, smacking a hand repeatedly against the side of an Asian man's head, creating a nauseating gash, dragging a body backward across the ground.
On the protagonists' harmless inaugural night in the ruins of Rustin Parr's home, Flack incorporates a montage of the quintet gathered around the campfire—chugging bottles of beer, smoking weed, sharing their critiques of The Blair Witch Project ("Two guys and a girl, sleeping in the same tent night after night, and no sex? It makes no sense," says Erica), expounding philosophical theories about the intersection between perception and reality—to develop their personalities and recapture the lighthearted ambiance of camaraderie that initiated the original trio's ill-fated expedition, strengthening the impact of when they begin to turn on each other.
Subverting the Myrick and Sanchez's disciplined technique of keeping overtly supernatural imagery off-camera, Flack displays a little Samara Morgan-looking ghost girl named Eileen Treacle (Lauren Hulsey), who wears a dress and has long, waterlogged hair and a mummified face, walking backward in fast motion, and seven children in old-fashioned garb who materialize in the middle of the street, also walking backward then disappearing after Kim swerves Jeff's van into a tree.
Flack's only editing misstep is her flashback inserts of Jeff in the psychiatric hospital, during which one of two shots is repeated ad nauseam: (1) Jeff lying unconscious on an operating table as white fluid, possibly saliva, ejects from his mouth, or (2) slamming his body against the cushioned walls of a padded cell in a straitjacket in fast motion. These flashbacks serve no purpose beyond pounding us over the head with reminders of Jeff's insanity. This man is mentally ill and was recently released from an asylum, the filmmakers seem to say, so don't be too quick to trust him. Meanwhile, why was Jeff sent to an asylum in the first place? What was his mental diagnosis? Why did the doctors feel comfortable releasing him? These are important questions that neither Berlinger nor Beebe is interested in interrogating.
The makeup employed to represent that the characters have been marked for death by the Blair Witch—blood-red symbols etched into their flesh—is simple yet unsettlingly effective, initially resembling a natural rash like that of poison oak, only to enlarge in the shapes of letters like an X. Kim has one on her shoulder, and the other three, minus Tristen, suspiciously, on their stomachs.
The most distinctive and unforgettable aspect of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is its chilling and ambiguous ending. While gruesome death is a factor throughout—the inconsequential tour group is disemboweled, Erica is killed off-screen in an indeterminate manner, her corpse discovered in a closet with ghost-white skin but no visible injuries, and Tristen is hanged seemingly voluntarily—the remaining three protagonists get to survive and leave the Black Hills, only to head straight into a fate potentially worse, and certainly more drawn-out, than death. With Sheriff Cravens finally receiving his wish, Kim, Stephen, and Jeff are arrested for murders they're certain they didn't commit... or have no memory of committing. As they sit handcuffed in separate interrogation rooms—where, to her surprise, Kim finds the witchy symbol removed from her shoulder—facing uncertain but inevitably grim futures, Berlinger and Beebe viciously subvert Jeff's earlier assertion that "the camera never lies."
Jeff, Stephen, and Kim are shown incriminating security footage that brings the themes of the dismantlement of reality and unreliability of sanity full circle: a nude Jeff is shown dragging Erica's corpse into the closet and positioning her to face the wall; while Kim is certain that she merely grabbed Peggy by her throat and threatened to rip it out if she ever touched her again, she's shown grabbing Peggy's nail file out of her hand and stabbing it repeatedly into her throat; likewise, while Stephen recalls Tristen wrapping the noose around her own neck and taunting him to push her over the railing, he's shown chasing her up the stairs, tying the noose around her neck himself as she tearfully pleads for her life, and mercilessly shoving her to her death.
By reshaping two previous altercations into murders from the supposedly impartial POV of a camcorder and surveillance camera, the filmmakers raise thought-provoking questions about reality and supernatural hypnosis: did the Blair Witch commit these crimes and fabricate the tapes? Did she possess her surviving targets to carry out her misdeeds while blocking it from their memories or hypnotizing them into believing they were doing something less heinous? Were Kim's altercation with Peggy and Stephen's with Tristen told from an objective or subjective point of view? Imagine sitting in an interrogation room and watching a video of yourself committing a crime you know in your heart you didn't commit, especially one as heinous and life-ruining as murder, and desperately professing your innocence to a room of unsympathetic lawmen. That is terrifying in a way that transcends death itself. What's worse: being murdered yourself or being framed for someone else's murder? This ending captures that helplessness and self-doubt with masterful precision.
By the end, none of the questions raised by Berlinger and Beebe have been answered. Who killed Erica? Why did she lie about her father? Was her name even Erica? All we know for certain is that the characters, if they did in fact commit the crimes, didn't act on their own free will. Before they can even process what they're witnessing, the film briefly cuts to black then illuminates on an aerial shot that sweeps over the leafless trees of the Black Hills Forest on a fall morning. An ending as abrupt, bizarre, and inconclusive as it is brilliant and film-defining. As memorable and atmospheric a subtitle as it is, I have no idea what "Book of Shadows" refers to in the context of Blair Witch 2's story, but this ending is the rare kind that will burrow under your skin and remain there, like one of the Blair Witch's rash-like symbols of death.
5.6/10
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