Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)

Occult legend collides with all-too-human realities in Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, the story of five young people whose obsession with The Blair Witch Project leads them into the heart of terror. Co-written and directed by award-winning documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills), Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is a lushly cinematic work that recalls classic horror films in its powerful evocation of unseen menace. A film for Blair Witch fans and newcomers alike, it expands on the mythology introduced in The Blair Witch Project while offering a self-contained, utterly terrifying experience.

Director Joe Berlinger’s acclaimed chronicles of real-life murder mysteries have combined suspenseful storytelling with keen attention to the ambiguities and contradictions of human behavior. He brings that distinctive artistic sensibility to bear in creating a tightly structured film that blurs the line between fact and fiction – a cornerstone of the Blair Witch series – in smart and surprising ways. The Blair Witch Project was a faux documentary that pondered the existence of a supernatural entity called the Blair Witch; Book of Shadows acknowledges the existence of The Blair Witch Project and ponders that film’s impact on five obsessed fans. As the deadly mayhem escalates, Book of Shadows inverts one of its predecessor’s elemental conceits: is the threat posed by The Blair Witch Project and other works of popular culture as nebulous as that posed by the Blair Witch?

Ultimately, Book of Shadows leaves the issue of the terror’s origins – human or supernatural – hauntingly unresolved. "The movie is open to interpretation," Berlinger observed. "In many ways, I’ve taken the murder mystery approach of my past work and married it to the horror genre. This is a story about the shadow existence of five people, who come together in the spirit of camaraderie and descend into an abyss."

What brings those characters together, of course, is The Blair Witch Project. That film tapped into the public’s fascination with reality-based entertainment by presenting itself as the found documentary footage of three doomed student filmmakers. Since the release of The Blair Witch Project, the American appetite for reality programming has only grown, evidenced most spectacularly by the success of the television series "Survivor" and "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," but apparent, too, in the continued popularity of programs like "Cops" and "Trauma: Life in the ER." Like The Blair Witch Project, many of these programs have generated a wealth of television, print and Internet coverage.

It is within this media-saturated environment that Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 plays out. Rather than ask audiences to put aside what they knew about the first film and suspend their disbelief, Berlinger chose to make the public response to The Blair Witch Project an integral component of the sequel’s premise. "Because of the unique set of circumstances surrounding the first movie, I saw an opportunity to do a sort of postmodern sequel," the filmmaker explained. "Even if they did not see the original film, everybody going into Book of Shadows knows that The Blair Witch Project was this phenomenon. So this became a movie about five characters who are obsessed with the first film. They explore whether the legend behind the movie is real or not."

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