This 2000 Sequel to a Blockbuster Horror Hit Is an Underrated Meta Chiller

Following up The Blair Witch Project (now streaming on Peacock) was always going to be impossible. That film, a found footage classic that took over the horror world in 1999, was an absolute phenomenon, spurred on by a brilliant and shadowy marketing campaign. There was simply no way a sequel could capture the same kind of dark magic, but thanks to the boatloads of cash Blair Witch raked in, studio Artisan Entertainment definitely had to try. 

Arriving a little more than a year after The Blair Witch Project exploded in the summer of '99, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (also streaming on Peacock) wisely tried to do something different with its story rather than simply creating another all-out found footage chiller. What writers Joe Berlinger and Dick Beebe came up with was ambitious and intriguing, as well as full of metafictional commentary on the Blair Witch phenomenon. But when the film hit theaters in October of 2000, it wasn't greeted with anywhere close to the explosive response of its predecessor. The film did fine at the box office, but it was critically blasted, and today remains widely viewed as a disappointment.

After nearly 25 years, it's time to reexamine that consensus. For all its disjointed storytelling and studio-mandated recutting, for all the ways in which it's definitely not The Blair Witch Project, Book of Shadows still has plenty to offer horror fans, particularly when it's willing to really play with its storytelling to deliver a wild journey into fandom, madness, and magical snares.

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2: Same Woods, New Rules

Book of Shadows takes place in a version of our world where The Blair Witch Project has already come out and become an indie movie phenomenon. Everyone's obsessed with it, and many of those obsessives are descending on the Maryland town of Burkittsville where the original movie was filmed for some unwelcome tourism. That means some locals are doing their best to cash in on the surge of visitors, and some of those locals have decided to take it upon themselves to be tour guides.

Enter Jeff (Jeffrey Donovan), a Maryland local with a troubled past who's set up "The Blair Witch Hunt," a tour of the Black Hills that exists alongside his gift shop enterprise which basically amounts to selling jars of local dirt and making stick figures and little rock formations. Jeff is an unabashed Blair Witch capitalist, and he's launching his tour with a small group of explorers who are all their for their own reasons. There's Erica (Erica Leerhsen), a Wiccan who's out to prove the Blair Witch is misunderstood, researcher Stephen (Stephen Barker Turner) and his girlfriend Tristen (Tristine Skyler), and Goth chick Kim (Kim Director), who "thought the movie was cool."

Berlinger sets up his film in much the same way that The Blair Witch Project sets up its own narratives. There are young people, there are cameras, and they're all eager to hang out in the woods and have a good time while maybe spotting something spooky. There's a sense of dialed-up merriment in the early scenes, as everyone seems to agree that they're going to have some beer and enjoy themselves and no one seems particularly worried about supernatural phenomena. To them, Project is only a movie, and you can probably see where the film is going with this. 

What happens next is a slowly unraveling psychological nightmare, as the tour group wakes up to find their campsite trashed, and realizes that something strange has happened overnight.

Lost in the Forest

Though there is plenty of action out in the woods, most of the meat of Blair Witch 2 takes place back at Jeff's house, a massive abandoned broom factory (because witches) that he's filled with electronics and surveillance equipment. It's here that the gang starts trying to piece together what happened to them, and it's here that the true weight of whatever went down in those woods starts to sink in. 

After matching some of the energy of the original film in the opening scenes, it's here that Book of Shadows starts to set itself apart while still staying close to certain key themes. As the film opens, we're told that what we're watching is a "re-enactment" of real events that happened in Maryland some time earlier, which means we're meant to know from the beginning that we're not just watching a movie, we're watching actors playing characters in a movie within a movie. This helps explain a certain heightened quality the film has, where the madness is dialed up, the locals behave especially strangely, and the characters talk a lot about the plot. It's not a perfect cover for certain craft choices, particularly in the script, but it's a very interesting starting point.

Within the context of this re-enactment, we watch as Jeff and company review their footage from the night before, trying to understand what they've missed, and learn that they "brought something back" from the woods with them, something that's made Tristan delirious, Erica paranoid, Kim fearful, and Jeff fraying at the edges. They're not lost in the woods anymore, but they are lost in the films they made in the woods, the same way Blair Witch obsessives got lost in the original film back in '99. It's a very smart way to frame things, even if the horror elements don't always land.

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2: An Underrated Sequel

It's easy to understand why Book of Shadows didn't land so well the first time around. It's a little bit clumsy, a little bit scattered, and it's deliberately playing with audience expectations based on how the first film did things, which means it can feel like a letdown by comparison. Looking at it again all these years later, though, Berlinger's film is an underrated, gutsy follow-up to a horror phenomenon. It doesn't edge into masterpiece territory, but it's the kind of smart sequel we could use more of in genre cinema, and it deserves a greater appreciation.

The Blair Witch Project and Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 are both streaming now on Peacock.