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.

Scream 3

Year 2000 Traits:

• Exclusively alt-metal soundtrack (including Godsmack, Incubus, System of a Down and Stained), produced by Creed
• Jay and Silent Bob cameo
• Patrick Warburton referred to in review as a “rising action star”
• Absence of original franchise writer to develop ABC’s Wonderland
• Liev Schreiber

When the first Scream was released in 1996, it was called it an ironic nod to the slasher film (the New York Times even defined it as “a parody”). But at the time mainstream horror was nearly extinct, relegated to direct-to-video sequels and TNT’s “Monstervision” for almost a decade. Scream itself would go on to single-handedly revive the genre, but most of the teenagers who flocked to see the film (myself included) were too young to have experienced the slasher genre it was poking fun at. We were watching it for genuine thrills, only marginally aware of its tongue-in-cheek references. Scream was taken so seriously, in fact, it was able to support a parody of its own, Scary Movie.

Scream 3, on the other hand, is undeniably a comedy-horror, with the “comedy” first in the hyphenate. Set in Hollywood during the production of “Stab 3,” a sequel-within-a-sequel about the “Woodsboro Murders” of the first Scream, the movie reunites Sydney (Neve Campbell), reporter Gail Weathers (Courteney Cox) and retired lawman Dewey (David Arquette) as they alternately pursue and evade the knife-wielding Ghostface, who’s been hunting the cast and crew of Stab 3, including a hilarious Parker Posey (the master of self-absorbed airheads) and Patrick Warburton, two comic actors who help make Scream 3 essentially a better parody of Scream 1 than Scary Movie was.

Scream 3 received mixed reviews, but re-watching it I’m convinced it’s the best installment of the series – largely due to the laughs. It hits the “sweet spot” of horror and comedy, only occasionally going to goofy with the laughs (as when Jay and Silent Bob make an awkward cameo), or too heavy-handed with the drama. This sweet spot is typically reached somewhere in the middle of horror series’ run (where, with the announcement of a fourth installment, Scream 3 will soon rest), between originals that take themselves too seriously and later chapters that don’t take themselves seriously enough. This is perhaps best represented by the Evil Dead Trilogy, part 2 of which strikes a nice balance between the genuine horror of the first and the Three Stooges-like antics of the third:

The six original Nightmare on Elm Street films illustrate this as well. The first was terrifying, but devoid of any sense of humor. Conversely, by the sixth film (Freddy’s Dead) the series had devolved into pure slapstick in which the  murders were more about putting Kreuger in a new costume (low point: The Bastard Son of 1,000 Maniacs wearing blue tights and shouting, “It’s Superfreddy!”). It was the mid-point of the franchise, Dream Warriors, that struck a nice balance between actual terror and self-knowing silliness. It has the series’ most famous Freddy pre-kill one-liners, and the attacks themselves are equal parts disturbing and hysterical, as when a topless nurse (in the greatest abstinence metaphor of the ’80s) uses her demonic tongue to restrain a victim to a bed that opens up into a portal to Hell.

What stands out 10 years later?

IT’S ABOUT THE DANGERS OF FILE-SHARING

Today, the online file-sharing controversy has settled into the digital equivalent of the Cold War, but 10 years ago it felt white-hot, with Nelly on one side of the Iron Curtain and his adolescent fans, armed with dial-up modems, on the other. Everyone in my upstate-New York High School, it seemed in 2000, knew a kid who knew a kid who had received a threatening letter from A&M Records.

Scream 3, released amidst the breakout of this war (a mere two months before Metallica filed its infamous lawsuit against Napster in April of 2000), not only references the Internet-versus-entertainment-industry debate, it makes the issue a key plot point in the film (perhaps the first and only film to do so). As the movie’s body count piles up, the stars of Stab 3 discover they’re being disposed in the order in which they die in the film-within-a-film’s script. The problem is, the Stab producers wrote three different endings to their sequel. “Something ‘bout keeping the ending off the Internet,” explains a steely Det. Kincaid (a pre-Grey’s Anatomy Patrick Dempsey) in that turn-of-the-century, These darn computers! tone. Without a clear ending, more pretty young stars die, and we the Internet, claims Scream 3, are to blame.

IT FEATURES THE ROLE OF DAVID ARQUETTE’S CAREER (SO FAR)

All the self-aware jokes about horror film cliches are what made the Scream franchise famous, but the movies’ most reliable comic presence is Dwight “Dewey” Riley, the bumbling former Woodsboro sheriff played by David Arquette. It’s been a decade since Arquette has played Dewey (he’s set to reprise the role in Scream 4) and he had a lengthy resume before he was cast in the first Scream, yet Dewey stands arguably as the actor’s best role to date. Granted, the mere fact that the character survived the first film is a kind of genre joke: What if one of those dimwitted anonymous cops you see in thrillers lived, and what if we got to know him? But by Scream 3 Dewey has outgrown his status as a parody of movie cops and become the most enjoyable part of the franchise next to Ghostface himself (or herself). Scream 3’s funniest exchange occurs when Dewey is confronted by Dempsy’s Det. Kincaid:

DEWEY: Is that a threat, detective?
KINCAID: When it’s a threat, you’ll know it.
DEWEY: (confused, then) Was that a threat?

Another Dewey joke, not quite as funny but still perfectly played by Arquette, inadvertently highlights the very specific technological era in which Scream 3 was made (perhaps even better than its Internet piracy theme). As Gail Weathers, in a tense scene, tries to figure out how the killer has discovered Sydney’s whereabouts, she turns to Dewey:

GAIL: Do you have her number in your memory?
Dewey scrunches his forehead, thinking.
GAIL: Phone memory.
DEWEY: Oh.

What dates this joke so specifically is that it both relied on the audience’s familiarity with the concept of a specific technology, as well as their acceptance that some people might not know what that technology was. If the joke had been made five years earlier, audiences themselves would not have assumed Weathers meant phone memory. If it had been made five years later, on the other hand, they would have scoffed at the idea that anyone, even a detective as absent-minded as Dewey and even as a joke, would legitimately not get her meaning. Only in 2000 (shortly after our own national embarrassment over defunct Y2K paranoia) could  America simultaneously laugh at and understand technological ignorance.

Supernova

Year 2000 Trademarks:

• Use of Sugar Ray’s “I Just Want to Fly” in trailer
• Casting of Victor from Party of Five
• Lou Diamond Phillips presented as sex object

What’s it like 10 years later?

It’s impossible to talk about Supernova without first mentioning the importance of the year 1996 for science fiction and horror. Sure, the year saw the premiere of The X-Files’s fourth season, which would finally reveal the Cigarette Smoking Man’s background, but more importantly it saw the triumphant big-screen revival of two genres that had been relegated to the backmost VHS shelves of rental joints since the mid-’80s: the slasher film and the alien invasion flick. Independence Day and Scream, two of 1996’s highest-grossing films, marked the triumphant return of the little green men and axe-wielding maniacs that were previously the fodder of Fangoria subscribers and ponytailed dudes with forearm tattoos.

For comparison: Before 1996 both the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises released their least-beloved installments, and the Alien franchise was nearly 20 years old. Then, immediately following 1996, we got I Know What You Did Last Summer, Men In Black, Urban Legend, The Blair Witch Project, Men In Black 2, and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Granted, these are only six of a hundred films released at the time, but considering these six made roughly half a billion dollars in less than 2 years and there were a dozen less-famous but still-successful knockoffs, it’s safe to say the year 1996 for sci-fi and horror was kind of like the year 1968 for American politics, only this was way more important.

It was only a matter of time before somebody had the brilliant idea to combine these two lucrative genres. Many, many people, in fact. For a brief period at the century’s turn, “science fiction horror” dominated movie screens. Alien had essentially invented this genre back in ‘79 by setting a salivating extraterrestrial loose on an isolated crew of space-miners. But this new crop of space slasher flicks was a bit different. They weren’t satisfied with zero-gravity carnage. Ampped on too many readings of Issac Asimov, these movies wanted to teach us something about the nature of the universe — when it wasn’t slicing astronauts into bloody, floating stumps. What this typically meant was a half-baked metaphysical theme, usually involving a black hole or some other pseudo-scientific mystery, like dark matter or whatever the blobs in The Abyss were made of. Whatever circa ’00s sci-fi horror was all about, it could apparently only be represented by moody blue lighting and electrical bolts:

From this era emerged Supernova, the story of an intergalactic medical emergency vessel in the 22nd century. The vessel’s crew, including co-pilot James Spader and paramedic Lou Diamond Phillips (remember these names), respond to a distress call from a distant mining operation and bring aboard a menacing patient (Peter Facinelli) and a mysterious pink space orb of “ninth-dimensional matter” that grants supernatural powers to whoever touches it. After Spader orders the orb jettisoned from his ship, their new patient –- addicted to the orb’s energy –- begins killing off the crew one by one. He also turns into a werewolf or something.

That’s right: James Spader and Lou Diamond Phillips. To me, these gentlemen alone firmly date Supernova in a past decade. This isn’t to say I’m not a fan Spader or LDP. On the contrary, I have great respect for them both. Spader in particular: After a breakout teenage performance in the 1980s (a decade that often proved a black hole of D-grade teen sex comedies and drug addiction for emerging young talent), Spader nobly entered what I call the “Dennis Quaid zone” of almost superstardom. And like Mr. Quaid, he’s proved one of the most reliable dudes you hope to pop up in random roles. (Rent Wolf and note how close Spader comes to out-doing star Jack Nicholson.) Still, I couldn’t look at Spader in Supernova and keep my mind from wandering back some 20 years to images of Stargate and Crash (the fucking in cars one, not the racism one).

This is why, while watching Supernova 10 years on, I found myself pondering James Spader’s career. Specifically the mid-career of James Spader: those vague years between his Brat Pack era (ending somewhere around sex, lies and videotape in 1989) and his recent breakout as the star of ABC’s Boston Legal. This era of a movie star’s resume — his mid-career — often proves to be the most interesting time professionally. Look at Sean Connery. We all know his dashing early days as James Bond and his post-Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade work as Hollywood’s go-to wise old Scottish dude, but that omits about 20 years. And that’s the time when Connery made weird shit like Zardoz, which was what he wore this in:

Though never reaching the bizarre highs of “Zardoz,” Spader’s mid-career is no less fascinating. Most significantly, watching mid-career Spader one finally realizes how God damn creepy of a performer he is. We’re talking Christopher Walken creepy. Nicholas Cage creepy. Peter Lorre creepy. Post-Devil’s Advocate Pacino creepy. In Spader’s early days, his creepiness –- a whispery manner of speaking and tendency to keep his eyes glazed while looking at people –- was written off as a trait of the snooty assholes Spader was typically cast as (Pretty in Pink, Less than Zero). But as he grew out of these roles and started landing typical straight man parts, it became apparent this was just the weird way in how Spader presented himself to the world. It’s kind of like when you realize those crazy stories your grandfather told you were just the early stages of senility: sad, but also a little fascinating.

The year following Supernova, in fact, Spader acted in one of those previously mentioned post-1996 mainstream horror films: “The Watcher.” In the film, Spader plays an FBI agent tracking a serial killer played by Keanu Reeves. Reeve’s “watcher” was a sadistic sociopath who stalked his prey for months, photographed them, then strangled them with piano wire. But in final film Spader comes out as the creepy one.