Berlinger told a reporter at the time he was even toying with a thematic subversion of the whole point of Paradise Lost: Maybe those churchy townsfolk were absolutely correct, and what if confused, outcast and gloomy young people who dress in black and identify with the macabre… really are demon-affiliated killers after all? So in theory, Book of Shadows should have been interesting. Berlinger’s narrative made the case a cause celebre and raised questions of guilt, xenophobia and miscarriages of justice (rather than fetuses).
SHADOW OF THE BLAIR WITCH SERIES
See, if fiction-makers pretending to be documentarians struck a bonanza, imagine the payoff using a documentarian to make a meta-fiction! So went the philosophy, anyhow.Īnd Joe Berlinger’s cinematic repute, in fact, rested on a transfixing series of true-crime features initiated with Paradise Lost: The Child Murders of Robin Hood Hills (1996), chronicling a haunting case in which a rural American community convicted three non-conformist young males with “Goth” aspects of having perpetrated a horrific, possibly occult-inspired killing spree. Note the attempts to replicate the original Blair Witch formula in search of the same box-office magic spell: unknown actors cast under their own names, and instead of original filmmakers Dan Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez (now billed as executive producers), the gambit in trying to catch Blair Witch lightning in a bottle a second time was to hire as director one Joe Berlinger – a legitimate documentarian. Jeff shepherds everyone to his HQ in the woods, a creepy mill out of Edgar Allan Poe, rewired and outfitted with his editing suite (!) to decipher, from salvaged video, what happened the previous night.
Worse, pregnant Tristen miscarries, and a bloody massacre has ensued nearby. The drugs come out, and – a legitimately spooky moment – they wake up to find their camp in shambles. The protagonists camp in supposed ruins once the dwelling of 18th-century witch Elly Kedward, aka the Blair Witch, whose curse reputedly caused murder and maledictions the past 200 years. Joining him for an outing are documentary filmmakers/lovers Tristen (Tristine Skyler) and Stephen (Stephen Barker Turner) and pretentious `Wiccans’ Kim (Kim Director) and Erica (Erica Leerhsen). Jeffrey Donovan is ‘Jeff,’ a Maryland slacker who peddles Blair Witch junk over the internet and offers tours. Such is the slightly smug tongue-in-cheek attitude initially that one expects a cameo by terminally dumb Jay and Silent Bob (which Scream 3 actually did). Sightseers and souvenir-hunters tramp throughout the scrub of rural Maryland looking for evidence of their new favourite scare flick. The setting is November 1999, the apex of Blair Witch hysteria. The $15 million BW2 dropped the documentary approach of the first feature for a straightforward but oh-so-clever post-modern narrative, punctuated by flashbacks and forwards, shock cuts and MTV-music-video style editing.
SHADOW OF THE BLAIR WITCH MOVIE
I tend to think a lot of them went on to get newsroom jobs in the media.)īook of Shadows thus entered movie houses as a new peg of the franchise tent-pole in time for Halloween, 2000. Yes, there were such naive folk around back in 1999. A quickly made sequel was just as foredoomed here as any callow young scripted characters traipsing around dark woods looking for a legendary supernatural killer.īook of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 could have been called Blair Witch 2.5, should one take into account the pre-existing mockumentary short feature Curse of the Blair Witch, quickly aired on cable TV, as an epilogue/prequel to tweak those few young, ignorant viewers in the early era of the “viral video” and Sundance Film Festival hype, who still clung to the notion originally pandered by the ad campaigns that the Blair Witch material was an actual disappearance case and that the story was completely true. The resulting box-office sensation returned something north of $100 million.
The original 1999 Blair Witch Project has not aged terribly well, partially because its found-footage horror gimmick has been copied repeatedly and aggravatingly ever since, by filmmakers at various levels of competence, ranging from the very good, such as Cloverfield, to the so-so to the wretched, such as… oh, way too many to mention.įigures vary, but estimates are that making the original Blair Witch Project cost its maverick young team the equivalent of a new-car purchase, some $20,000 to $30,000.
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