he Blair Witch Project caught the imagination of the nation, especially that belonging to four tourists who travel to Burkittsville, Md., to tour the locations seen in the movie. Led by Jeff, a local resident and former mental patient who runs a "Blair Witch Hunt" tour, they set off into the Maryland woods.
Pregnant Tristen (Skyler) and her boyfriend, Stephen (Turner), are going to complete a book on the supposed Blair Witch legend and the media frenzy surrounding it. Erica (Leerhsen), a Wiccan, wants to commune with the spirit of Elly Kedward, the 18th century woman who was accused of witchcraft. Kim (Director), a Morticia-like Goth, simply thought the movie "was cool."
They camp out at the foundations of the house occupied by Rustin Parr, the man who murdered seven children in the 1940s, supposedly at the behest of the ghostly witch. After a night of drinking, dope-smoking and spirited conversation, the group awakes in the morning to discover that someone has trashed their camp, destroyed Tristen and Stephen's research and smashed Jeff's cameras. They have no memory of the previous five hours. But Kim, who has demonstrated an eerie psychic ability, says the answers lie in Jeff's videotapes--buried under the stones of the wall where Heather Donahue's footage was found three years earlier. Suddenly, Tristen suffers a miscarriage.
Rushed to the hospital, Tristen has a vision of a drowned child, one of the early victims of the Blair Witch. The group reconvenes at Jeff's loft to comb the tapes for answers. But Erica begins feeling the presence of something evil, and each member of the group experiences frightening visions.
Meanwhile, word of gruesome murders reaches them--and suspicion falls on each in turn. Has the curse of the Blair Witch followed them home?
No tricks, no treats
Book of Shadows is the highly anticipated sequel to one of the movie industry's true phenomena, the by-now-legendary independent movie that broke box-office records with a spooky story of three college students who got lost in the woods.
Directed by acclaimed documentarian Joe Berlinger and starring a cast of unknowns, Book of Shadows intelligently constructs a new story with a post-modern take on the original movie and the hype around it. With a budget roughly 100 times that of the original movie, the sequel also makes no pretense of being anything other than a commercial movie shot on 35mm film, complete with a Marilyn Manson soundtrack and full production values. The trick was to find a way to make a movie that would capture some of the on-screen sorcery of the original movie--a difficult, if not impossible task, given the high expectations for any sequel.
Alas, despite some creative direction and an intriguing premise, Book of Shadows disappoints for a variety of reasons. Mainly, in seeking to make a polished film for the sequel, Berlinger abandons precisely those elements that made the original Blair Witch such an effective piece of horror: its guerilla feel, verisimilitude and elusiveness. By adopting an ironic approach to the Blair Witch mythology, moreover, Berlinger distances the viewer from the proceedings in a way that robs the movie of any true scariness.
Beyond that, the movie suffers from amateurish dialogue, terrible acting and a murky plot. Berlinger uses flashbacks, flashforwards and other time-shifting narrative devices to break up the story. The result is more often confusing than creepy.
Perhaps trying to preserve the argumentative dynamic of the first film, Book of Shadows also devotes a lot of time to disputes among the characters--first about the meaning of the Blair Witch myth, and later in a series of The Thing-like paranoid rantings about who's responsible for various mishaps. The more the characters argue, the more the viewer is likely to find them all even more irritating than Heather in the original movie. And that does little to make the viewer care much about their eventual plight.
