Not to devolve into old man yelling at cloud territory, but the younger generations to have grown up in the internet age won’t be able to fully comprehend just how big of a deal The Blair Witch Project was back in 1999, although they can damn sure appreciate how much its sequel Book of Shadows sucked.
Trying to follow up a seminal horror that became a global phenomenon, ushered in the era of both found footage and viral marketing – as well as winding up as one of the most profitable movies in history – was doomed to fail, but director Joe Berlinger has revealed what everybody unfortunate enough to have seen it suspected; studio interference was at play.
In an interview with Polygon reflecting on the ill-fated successor, the filmmaker noted that while he doesn’t “hate the movie,” he nonetheless “hated the experience of what happened” while ruminating on the post-production changes.
“My cut had a very satirical tone that takes a horrifying twist at the end, kind of like a Scream, I was making fun of the whole idea of actually doing a sequel. It was a meditation on the dangers of blurring the lines between entertainment and news, between fiction and reality in our society – never dreaming where we’d land today. So they ordered reshoots and added things that just to this day boggle my mind.”
Trashed by critics and lambasted by anyone with an affinity for The Blair Witch Project, Book of Shadows is easily one of the worst sequels to a classic there’s ever been. As Berlinger succinctly put it through the power of hindsight; “I underestimated the amount of venom that anything called Blair Witch 2 was going to have.”
