Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
Year 2000 Trademarks:
- Fake MTV News brief with Kurt Loader
- Nu metal soundtrack (including System of a Down)
- “Goths aren’t evil!” debate
The best part of re-watching Book of Shadows, 2000’s follow-up to The Blair Witch Project, isn’t watching the film at all, but re-visiting (by proxy) the Great Blair Witch Craze that the sequel proved the culmination of. America in 1999, not yet interested in which cave bin Laden was inside and no longer interested in whose mouth the president was, turned its full attention instead to the story of three film majors who tote cameras into the Maryland woods, get lost, and find themselves thrown into a scenario terrifying even by student film standards.
We all know the story: The Blair Witch Project was a no-budget film that, thanks to a clever premise, ahead-of-its-time marketing tactics, eerily natural performances from its three stars*, and some genuine thrills grossed (to date) a quarter of a billion dollars. More importantly, the movie became more damn ubiquitous than just about any film since.
It’s difficult to imagine in 2010 the significance a single motion picture could once have. Today, movies are so desperate for attention they’ve literally added an entire dimension. The Blair Witch Project represents the last time every type of American citizen was talking about the same movie at the same time. If you were alive and possessed optic nerves in the summer of 1999, you saw The Blair Witch Project. It was like a shopping mall version of the Camp David Summits, bringing together diverse cultures of the era, form rich kids in Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirts to dudes who Sharpied their fingernails black during statistics class to your Tae Bo-toned stepmother, for the shared goal of being scared shitless and watching shaky cameras pointed at leaves. If the morlocks had taken over planet Earth that July, they would’ve lured the eloi with promises of a free underground Blair Witch screening. And if parody is representative of cultural influence, than The Blair Witch Project was like The Renaissance meets The Beatles meets season one of Survivor. Blair Witch parody in fact became an industry unto itself, supporting not one, but two feature spoofs: The Bogus Witch Project and Steve Odenkirk’s The Blair Thumb.
This simply doesn’t happen anymore. Even Inception, the first film in a while that was talked about for more than a week after its release, lasted a fraction of how long The Blair Witch stuck around. And to last just that long Christopher Nolan had to make the most complicated mainstream film of all time. Somewhat ironically, the source of modern Hollywood’s attention deficit — technology — was the very source that propelled The Blair Witch Project to its phenomenon status. The film was marketed through the Internet in a way that today is glaringly obvious and by-the-book, but in 1999 was apparently more revolutionary than the decoding of the human genome. Every article written during Blair Witch Mania that I read spoke with wide-eyed astonishment about the ability of a movie to be discussed on the information superhighway. The still-active BlairWitch.com was hailed as a breakthrough in online promotion when it launched, and when the co-directors premiered the trailer not in theaters but on Ain’t It Cool News, it made it into a Time magazine cover story.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was how Blair Witch Mania ended: not with a bang, but with a hastily-produced whimper. To be fair, the sequel begins with lofty ambitions. It attempts to play with narrative conventions and blur lines between fiction and reality the way its predecessor did, presenting a fictional story about four Blair Witch Project fans (a sexy Wicca, a sarcastic goth and a pair of married historians) who hop in a grungy van on a “Blair Witch Tour” through the (fictitious) woods of Burkitsville, Maryland. They are led by Jeff (Burn Notice’s Jeffrey Donovan), a potentially insane tour guide who resembles 80% of the supporting actors on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
That’s where the ambition stops. Book of Shadows quickly turns into the exact kind of horror film the original Blair Witch was a reaction against, complete with little girls in Victorian dresses, stabbings and NIN in-your-face editing. The movie ends (spoiler alert) with Jeff and the tourists accused of committing a brutal murder motivated by an “obsession” with The Blair Witch Project. “Sadly, as has happened so many times before in this country, violent art has inspired real-life violence,” sermonizes a reporter. It’s a pretty eye-roll-inducing allusion to the blame that trench-coat celebrities like Marilyn Manson and the Wachowski Brothers faced in the late ’90s. It’s dated not because we’ve stopped caring about violence that much, but because we’ve stopped caring about movies that much.
*Heather Donahue, the awesome female lead of the first Blair Witch who improvised the most famous movie shot of the ’90s (the snot-nosed Donahue Confession), is today a marijuana legalization proponent who has written for the Huffington Post. This doesn’t have anything to do with Book of Shadows, but was too interesting not to share.
