I've had the occasion before to give people my opinion on Blair Witch 2, and I fully realize that I'm in the minority. I've said that only about one out of every ten people liked the movie, whatever their reasons were for doing so, and that I was in that ten percent. Even I had my problems with the film, which I've mentioned in my original review, below, and won't go into here. However, Berlinger's commentary reveals that the film would have been better, and certainly less condescending, if Artisan hadn't interfered with it by changing the chronology and pushing for gore that was absent from the original cut. According to Berlinger, his director's cut of Book of Shadows was both edited differently and had no scenes of gore intercut throughout the film. Even now, he objects to those scenes as being counter to his intentions of instilling ambiguity in the plot. My question is this: why would a studio push for gore in a sequel to a film that grossed over 4000% of its shooting budget and yet had very little gore? It's as if the studio forgot that the first film proved there was an audience--a young one, no less--for psychological horror, and they decided, despite evidence to the contrary, to choose now to treat us like idiots. I am in hope that we will someday see the director's cut of Book of Shadows, but its disappointing box office (relatively speaking, relatively speaking) may have rendered that unlikely. Now, on with the review . . .

Through wonderfully grimy, historically evocative sets, autumnal colors, and muted directing, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 maintains a creepy, involving atmosphere from beginning to end. It's a shame that other aspects of the film--like, say, the acting and some aspects of the writing--don't always support its attempts at being outwardly interesting. The writing in Book of Shadows succeeds in presenting the film as a bundle of ideas and potentially interesting characters, but it's not particularly cohesive. The dialogue is at times uncomfortable and even forced; at such times it falls to the actors to keep things moving forward in a realistic way, and only one, Kim Director, comes through all the time, though Erica Leerhsen is a close second. The rest of the acting runs the gamut, from good (Jeffrey Donovan's modulated performance) to contrived (one of the actors is fine until she goes a little nuts, at which point she isn't very convincing) to ridiculous (a hopelessly clichéd local yokel sheriff). The scare scenes are unremarkable, but the film progresses at such a deliberate pace that they aren't necessary--the movie is submerged in its own atmosphere, and the better for it.

There's another level at work in Book of Shadows, the presence of which didn't strike me until a few hours after I left the theater. The phenomenon surrounding the first Blair Witch film was almost entirely about deception, about the ability of film to blur the lines between reality and fantasy. Its ability to fool people into thinking that a fiction had actually occured and to trick them into believing that something utterly true was impossible. The events of Book of Shadows are, in fact, a representation of that idea. The characters attempt to use film for their own ends--both to chronicle their exploits and, later, to bring meaning to events which they cannot remember nor make sense of. Their fatal mistake is in assuming that, as one character says, "video doesn't lie." What the characters think they do and what the camera reveals they have done are often two different things, and the challenge Book of Shadows presents to us is figuring out what is true and what is false. Or, more likely, its real challenge is to get us to accept the conclusion that truth is often unimportant in the face of consequences. What is more important: reality--or perception of reality? And, in the end, who has the ability to judge?

RATING

Horror nowadays has a very strange problem: it has become popular. Nothing wrong with that? Usually I'd tend to agree. But popularity mostly leads to a general softening and smoothening of a phenomenon--as something gets accepted by a larger audience, it will be judged by this larger audience, meaning, it loses its niche position and is subjected to a very different process of opinion-making than before. If horror is only watched by a handful of people, i.e. those used to it, it can be much more drastic--but once the audience gets larger, the stakes--money-wise--are higher, so you don't want to alienate your audience. That's the classic conflict between independent and studio productions. That doesn't mean that there can't be good studio-produced movies, on the contrary, yet nothing beats the independence you get with, well, independent productions. There's yet another factor: Money. Studio productions can be larger, thus enabling a greater use of effects. That may be good for action movies, but it can be a death blow for a decent horror film, for horror can work best when it's done subtly and less directly. Once you show the monster in full, once you expose it, it's over, the thrill is gone.

Today, horror is all over movies and television. Older shows like The Twilight Zone and the (more or less lately) revived Outer Limits are rather clinging towards a mixture between horror and SF, aiming for an obvious moral message. But it was Twin Peaks that started start today's horror wave, with The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer--as well as their spin-offs, Millennium and Angel--delivering horror to a larger audience, so that there's plenty of monsters you could get used to. Yet that's just the tip of the iceberg. All of these are the good shows, the flagships, so to say, well-versed in storytelling and mixing horror with humor. There's nothing wrong with that, they rather exploit the cult than the cult exploits them, and they are still able to be creative, the active shows that is. But all the other stuff, Poltergeist, Profiler, Psi Factor, Charmed, even Sabrina the Teenage Witch--all these are rather created by the cult; they are either too dark or too pointless to count. This, of course, is a highly subjective analysis--but I reckon that none of these would survive if the big ones died. Horror may seem popular, but true horror is still a fragile construction, as was illustrated by the death of Millennium. Yet not even that's my point. Elements of horror, or mimicking the big horror shows, can nowadays be found even where they are rather not suspected to exist, like in JAG, Star Trek: Voyager or even Ally McBeal. Movies like Scream posing as "scary movies" are anything but scary, yet they have made horror a hip phenomenon, or rather, what they consider to be horror. That's partly what I meant by smoothening, and even John Carpenter, the otherwise justly so called "master of horror" has given us such a strange creature as Vampires. It's all the more refreshing to--finally--once again have a movie which deserves to be called a horror film, a movie which doesn't care if it's too smart, too incomprehensible for the average redneck, a movie which is bloody and ugly and simply bad to the bone.

The first Blair Witch movie was about a group of kids going into the woods searching for some ancient myth, being totally unprepared both mentally and in terms of equipment. The end left the audience guessing. Part two now is sort of a continuation--now without the handheld video camera, without the cheap feeling, without the mockumentary character. Yet the premise is the same. Part one fucked with people's minds, part two does the same--only on another, less obvious level. This is a "real" movie, with a soundtrack--which is extraordinary, to say the least--and filmed with the help of a movie camera and lots of sfx and vfx stuff to make it real. You have still strands of the series's mockumentary background running through it, so the sequel is rather a continuation than a rip-off, taking the original concept to a different level. This time, the crew is better equipped, larger, more experienced. Yet this can be a disadvantage, too--and of course, something gets wrong. Yet this is not your ordinary slasher flick, it's horror--maybe that's what some reviewers don't understand. Horror happens inside you--it's not big blobby monsters hopping around, it's psychological. You'll know what I mean once you see it.

This movie is a reminder that the topic of horror is nothing nice, nothing comfortable, nothing to go to bed with at night. It is about confronting an audience used to smoothened fairy tales with the real ugliness which lies beneath the surface of things--and it follows the postmodern attack against the conventional perception of reality. And it is about deriding this utterly ridiculous notion that science and the scientific method would be able to finally unmask the unexplained. Reality is far more complex, and if seen from this movie's perspective, you better watch out. Some things are not what they seem to be.