Flak Magazine: Review of Book of Shadows, 10-30-00

The decision to bring Joe Berlinger on to co-write and direct Book of Shadows, the sequel to 1999’s horror blockbuster The Blair Witch Project, is a microcosm for everything wrong with this deeply disappointing movie, which is filled with good ideas that fail in totally uninteresting ways.

Berlinger is the acclaimed co-director of such documentaries as Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, which investigates the circumstances surrounding the imprisonment of three adolescents following a brutal triple homicide in West Memphis, Ark.; the original Blair Witch film was the ultimate campfire spook story, a “documentary” culled from footage allegedly found after the disappearance of three college students who went off to the woods seeking the supposed Blair Witch and wound up dead.

As natural and sensible as it may seem to have Berlinger helm the sequel, however, Book of Shadows isn’t a documentary — it’s a fiction, albeit a “re-enactment” of events that we’re told followed the theatrical release of The Blair Witch Project. And when it comes to fiction film, Berlinger is a first-timer — and boy, does it show.

The story concerns itself with a “Blair Witch Hunt” tour group headed by Jeff (Jeffrey Donovan — the characters all share the same first name as the novice actors for added verisimilitude), recently out of the asylum he was put into for unspecified reasons. The crew includes goth chick Kim (Kim Director), Wiccanlicious earth child Erica (Erica Leerhsen) and researching twosome Stephen (Stephen Baker Turner) and Tristen (Tristen Skyler), who’s 6 weeks pregnant. They venture through familiar woods to a house steeped in Blair Witch mythos, and the film simultaneously presents the travails of their tour — four hours are missing from their first night, during which all their equipment was trashed — alongside the police interrogation of members of the group … that is, the ones that survive! (Maniacal laugh, stifled yawn.)

It’s easy to see what Berlinger’s interest in the project was, and, indeed, every future academic study of his work will have to include Book of Shadows because the film’s central conceit is something which must lie in the heart of every documentarian: the distance between perception and reality, between the recorded image and the truth. Stephen and Tristen are working on a book called “The Blair Witch Project: Hysteria or History?” and they have long, explicit discussions about whether reality is determined by the number of people who believe in it and the phenomenon of mass hallucinations.

The layer Book of Shadows lies on top of that is Jeff’s compulsion to videotape everything in the hopes of capturing an occult happening; in the second and third act, during which the group is sequestered in Jeff’s converted-factory home, they scour the videotapes for clues as to who destroyed their stuff … but the footage of events they do remember doesn’t correspond to their memory. (It starts off with a tree not being where they think it should be.) In short order, the characters are forced to reckon with the supposed infallibility of their memories versus the supposed infallibility of the camera. The characters believe with all their conviction that the reality of the situation is different from the record of it — something a documentarian like Berlinger must be more than passingly familiar with.

The Blair Witch Project also posed quandaries like this; of course, The Blair Witch Project was also scary, unlike Book of Shadows, which is tedious in ways best left to Mel Gibson to articulate. Berlinger’s film has far, far fewer chills than it does moments of revulsions — lots of knives twisting squishily into torsos, etc. And while the central perception/record dichotomy is creepy, it only has a handful of truly eerie manifestations (at one point, you see video footage of the videotape that footage must have been recorded on). One path to greater effectiveness may have been if it leaned less heavily on Blair Witch lore that it fails to make clear — an hour or so into it and you realize you’re going to have to wait for Blair Witch 3 before any of this makes sense.

And while arbitrary, free-floating evil is a fine thing to power a horror movie with, everyone in the audience showed up to learn more about the unanswered questions of The Blair Witch Project — everyone, that is, except those peope who have been to the Blair Witch Web site every week since last summer. Book of Shadows definitely seems aimed at that demographic, but that’s a pitiful demographic to target because it hardly exists. The filmmakers appear to have severely overestimated how much the movie-going populace is interested in their hype machine; all audiences want is to understand a little bit more about the first movie and to be scared. Book of Shadows fails on both counts.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)