In the summer of 1999, The Blair Witch Project is released and becomes a certifiable cultural phenomenon. While it's understood that the movie itself is a work of fiction, whether or not the legend of the Blair Witch is real is less clear, and a flood of tourists and fans descends on the small town of Burkittsville, Maryland, with mixed reactions from the locals. That fall, Jeff, a local resident and fan who runs a website selling memorabilia related to the film, embarks on the inaugural trek of his Blair Witch Hunt tours, where he takes people into the same woods where the characters in the film disappeared. Along for the ride are Stephen and Tristen, who are researching a book on the phenomenon, Erica, a Wiccan who is unhappy about the bad press the movie has given her religion, and Kim, a Goth who seems to have psychic abilities. Hiking into the woods, the group camps at the ruins of Rustin Parr's house, with Jeff setting up various cameras in the hopes of capturing an image of the real Blair Witch. After sending another tour group on a wild goose chase to the infamous Coffin Rock, the group spends the rest of the night partying, drinking, and smoking pot, before completely blacking out. The next morning, they awaken to find that Stephen and Tristen's research has been shredded apart and strewn everywhere, and that Jeff's camera equipment is totally trashed. However, his footage is discovered buried under the house's foundation, just like where Heather Donahue's footage is said to have been found in the movie's mythology. Tristen, who is six weeks pregnant, suffers a miscarriage and is rushed to the nearby hospital, where she sees a ghoulish vision of a little girl walking backwards in a jittery manner. She's discharged and the group heads to Jeff's home, a large building in the woods that was once an abandoned factory, so he can go over the camera footage to see what happened during the time they were passed out. While doing so, Jeff uncovers bizarre images hidden in the footage, and the longer they're there, the more the group experiences unsettling visions and frightening phenomena, including pagan symbols appearing on their bodies in the form of a skin rash. Whether they're suffering from a group delusion or an evil force has attached itself to them is unclear, but one thing is: the footage is revealing that all is not as it seems or as they remember it.
Jeff's paranoia and accusations towards the others, no doubt influenced by the weed he's smoking, reach new heights when the bodies of another tour group they led to Coffin Rock that fateful night are discovered mutilated and Sheriff Cravens believes that they're behind it. Jeff tells the others that no one is leaving him behind to take the fall for it, and he still thinks that Erica, whom he does believe is a real witch, is behind it all, especially when they learn that she seemed to have lied about who she really was. Like the others, Jeff starts to see bizarre images, like Kim chewing on the body of an owl that crashed through the place's window, and he and the others hallucinate that Cravens is right outside the house, demanding Jeff come out and see him, even though the bridge that leads to the front door is supposed to be out. It's also revealed that he has files on everyone in the group, files that he claims to not have known about after Kim comes across them in a desk drawer. After Jeff finds Erica's body in a closet by the front door, they again point fingers at who did it, when Tristen shows up, acting bizarre and hinting at how to find out what happened to the missing hours in the footage. With this, Jeff comes to believe that she's been possessed by the Blair Witch and is behind it all. Videotaping her, he and the others try to get her to confess but she's ultimately hanged in the end and they're charged for her and Erica's murder, as well as those of the second tour group. As they're being interrogated about it, Jeff is confident that Cravens is simply looking to pin anything on him that he can but, like the others, he''s faced with video footage that shows they seem to be behind what happened. In his case, his security footage reveals him hiding Erica's body in the closet while hes in the nude.
Though they're working together on a book about the Blair Witch phenomenon, Stephen (Stephen Ryan Parker) and his girlfriend, Tristen (Tristine Skyler), have very different viewpoints on it. Long story short, Tristen believes in the old adage that myths and legends have to spring from some kind of truth, but Stephen feels they're simply born out of hysteria and mass delusions and doesn't take anything about the mythology seriously. He gets pretty drunk and high on weed when they're out camping and continuously rags on the legend, making jokes about it and is unwilling to listen to Tristen's stance on the subject, saying, "I know what you're saying; I just think it's bullshit." While they have a good time while out camping, that doesn't last long when they wake up the next morning to find their research has been turned into confetti. Initially, Stephen is all upset about how his research is gone and he's not going to make his deadline, as well as suspicious about why those who vandalized their camp didn't do the same to Jeff's tapes, but he soon has other things to worry about when Tristen, who's six weeks pregnant, suffers a miscarriage. At the hospital, after she sees a bizarre and disturbing vision of a little girl, Tristen decides not to stay there and so, she and the others head to Jeff's home so he can review the video footage. Once there, she and Stephen crash out in Jeff's bedroom, while he goes over the footage, and Tristen tells Stephen about the girl she saw, who was identical to an image of one in the Blair Witch's Black Bible. She also confesses that, the night before, she had a dream about drowning their baby in the river, which has made her feel extremely guilty, as she herself didn't want the baby but Stephen did. After this confession, Tristen remains in bed for a good chunk of their time there, while Stephen, like the others, starts to have bizarre hallucinations. He hears Tristen calling for him, only to then find that she's asleep, and hears the sound of kids crying outside Jeff's front door, but when he looks out there, he sees an image of a girl similar to the one Tristen saw. Stephen, however, feels that there's a rational explanation for it all and that they just need to go home, but Tristen doesn't want to go until she figures out what's going on. After that, Stephen and Erica share a hallucination where a sudden makeout session between them turns violent, and Tristen becomes more and more freaked out and sure she's losing her mind.
The next morning, Stephen's plan to take Tristen home gets derailed when Erica, who was going to drive them, suddenly disappears and Jeff's van is now totaled, even though it was only slightly damaged the night before. Tristen talks about a dream she had regarding kids dipping their hands in people's blood and smearing it on their bodies, as they all realized they're marked with the same pagan symbol-shaped rashes. Everyone starts to turn on each other when no sign of Erica is found and the paranoia only heightens when Sheriff Cravens accuses them of being involved in the murder of the other tour group at Coffin Rock. That night, there's a moment where Tristen says she sees Erica outside. When everyone looks, they don't see anything, but Tristen gets Stephen to look again and when he does, he sees Erica, dancing around a small tree in only her underwear. He goes to the front door, finding her outside, but as he approaches, she backs away, telling him, "You know who it is, and you know what you have to do." The bridge spanning the chasm then collapses beneath Stephen's feet and he manages to grab onto something but, after seeing the same image from before of the little girl, this time speaking in Erica's voice, he has to be helped up by the others when Tristen just stands over him and looks down at him as he hangs there. In the next scene, Stephen finds Tristen freaking out in the bedroom, babbling about having the dreams of Elly Kedward, the woman who became the Blair Witch in the legend, and seeing how she was killed, while Stephen tries to help her get a grip on herself. Later, after they've found Erica's body, Tristen shows up in Jeff's editing loft, talking about "widdershins" and speaking backwards. This gives Kim the idea to play the footage backwards and when Jeff does, they learn what happened during the hours they were blacked out: they took part in a crazed ritual and orgy, one where Tristen appeared to be the ringleader, going as far as hiding the tapes afterward. When they've seen this, they try to get Tristen to tell them what happened, only for her to start swinging back and forth between frightfully pleading with them and cruelly mocking them, including Stephen. Thinking she's been possessed by the Blair Witch, Jeff tries to get her to confess on videotape but Tristen puts a noose around her neck and dares Stephen to hang her with it. Angered by her taunts, he does push her, causing her death, and he and the others are arrested for the deaths of her, Erica, and the tour group. As they're interrogated by the police, Stephen insists that Tristen was the one who put the rope around her neck and taunted him into pushing her. He implores the authorities to look at the videotapes to see what really happened, but when they show them to him, he sees that it depicts him, Kim, and Jeff trying to make a terrified Tristen confess to being a witch, ending with Stephen heartlessly pushing her to be hung and commenting, "Fucking witch!" The movie ends with Stephen insisting the tape has been doctored, screaming, "That's fucking bullshit!" (This may be heartless but, whenever he tries to come off as upset or distraught, he sounds unintentionally funny to me.)
The next day, Kim is confused when Jeff points out that the front of his van is completely smashed in, insisting that she just dented the fender the night before. When Erica disappears, Jeff believes that both her and Kim are playing some sort of prank, since Kim was the one who found her discarded clothes in her room. Kim pleads innocence and says she thinks something bad happened to Erica, which leads them to call the man she said was her father and learn that she apparently lied about who she was. After they learn of the murder of the other tour group, Kim starts to believe Erica was right when she said they brought something back with them and becomes enraged when Jeff, in his paranoia, accuses Erica of being behind everything since she's a witch. Later, while looking for the name of the doctor Tristen saw in the phone book, Kim finds a series of dossiers on all of them in Jeff's desk. When she and Stephen confront him about it, Jeff denies any knowledge of them, suggesting that she may have planted them in there. Once they find Erica's body, they start pointing fingers at each other again, though this time, Jeff vouches for Kim, saying she was with him when Erica vanished. Kim suggests that it may have been Tristen, when she shows up in the loft and talks about widdershins, giving Kim the idea to play the footage backwards. Once they do and see what happened, they all confront Tristen about it, trying to get her to confess that she's the Blair Witch, leading to her hanging. Like Jeff and Stephen, after they're arrested, Kim is faced with some video evidence that appears to prove she actually does have blood on her hands: in this case, it's security footage from the convenience store that shows her killing the cashier with her own nail file.
I can remember thinking at the time of the movie's release, "Well, that proves once and for all that the first one was fake; this one is a normal movie." I was referring to the lack of the "found footage" motif this time and, yeah, over a year in, I was still wondering if the whole Blair Witch thing was real or not. This proved to be the final nail in that coffin. In retrospect, even though documentaries were his specialty, I can respect Joe Berlinger for deciding to go for a completely different approach, as he knew the format of the first movie wouldn't work a second time and plus, it had been parodied way too much since then anyway. And I'll say, for a guy who'd never shot a traditional movie before, he made it look pretty good, capturing the lovely look and feel of the forests of Maryland in the fall, with a rich, golden brown color scheme in some scenes, an overcast, gray feeling in others, and plenty of beauty shots of the area, some of which were filmed from a helicopter (they look especially nice if you manage to see it in high-def). The graveyard where they first pick up Kim also looks really cool and gets some nice coverage, and you get a bit of a sense of the surrounding rural area, its hick feeling, and how the locals aren't too thrilled with the attention the movie has put on them. The filmmakers built the ruins of the Rustin Parr house out of styrofoam in the middle of the woods and, man, if it doesn't look real and has a definite atmosphere to it. As I've said before, I just really get into those kinds of isolated locations in movies. They also managed to turn an abandoned sanitarium in Baltimore into the hospital where Tristen is taken when she has her miscarriage and, while it looks like a working hospital in the film, it has a detectable feeling of emptiness that works for the scenes set there, most notably Tristen's freakish vision.
The most memorable location in the movie is Jeff's home, which he made out of an old factory up in the Black Hills he says he bought for one dollar; in reality, that location is the Clipper Mill in Baltimore. It sits in the middle of a deep ravine, the front door only accessible by a bridge with rickety handrails, and when the front door is opened, the sound of barking dogs are heard, though it turns out to be just a burglar alarm. Jeff also has security cameras set up throughout the place, admitting that he's a little paranoid, as he has a lot of expensive stuff lining the hallway that leads to the main room. Just beyond that is the source of the items he sells on his website's store: a space where he makes stick figures and keeps, among other things, items like rock formations, dirt from the Parr ruins, T-shirts, sweatshirts, caps, and cups with the stick figure printed on them. The main hub of the place has a loft that's full of Jeff's video and editing equipment, as well as a workspace, with a really weird phone, a living area with a nice couch and a television set, and another set of stairs leading to a second level. Scattered around this spot are the bedrooms and the closest thing he has to a kitchen/dining area. It's an interesting setting and, once the bridge falls apart and the characters start to become distrustful of each other, it manages to give off a feeling of isolation, claustrophobia, and paranoia.
In wanting to make a movie about the impact that the media can have on the public and the consequences of blurring the line between fantasy and reality, Berlinger deliberately does that constantly in the movie, starting with the very notion that this takes place in the "real world," where The Blair Witch Project was just a movie. Furthermore, he begins his film by showing what a phenomenon the movie was, with actual clips of Kurt Loder of MTV News, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Andy Richter, and Roger Ebert speaking about it around the time of its release, before going into the uncertainty of whether or not the Blair Witch legend is real and how people began flocking to Burkittsville to find out. You see actual interviews that Berlinger conducted with the town's residents, who have various opinions on the matter: some have no problem with the attention, while others wish that those behind the movie had chosen a fictional town to set it in. These interviews are interspersed with fictionalized clips of Jeffrey Donovan being interviewed as his character, Berlinger himself and another woman acting as tourists, talking about the film's legendary website, and footage of Sheriff Cravens and his men chasing people out of the woods, something that actually happened to Berlinger during his time filming in Burkittsville. While Lanny Flaherty's acting is so bad ("There is no... goddamn... Blair Witch) that it hurts the opening's credibility, it still sets up the idea of not knowing what's real and what isn't.
Indeed, like the first film, that's the main thing about this flick: you don't know what's going on at all. Ignoring the ill-advised editing that the studio placed at the beginning and throughout it (I'll get to that in a minute), the movie starts out as a relatively light-hearted romp in the woods near Burkittsville, as Jeff takes the group on his first Blair Witch Hunt tour. They visit the Parr ruins, have a fun time smoking weed and getting drunk, send another tour group that tries to muscle in on their territory on a wild goose chase to Coffin Rock, and debate The Blair Witch Project and its mythology. It almost feels like the movie is going to be nothing more than a satire of its predecessor but then, things begin to turn sinister the next morning, when they find that their camp has apparently been ransacked. Little by little, strange things start happening: Tristen dreams about murdering her baby before she suffers the miscarriage, Jeff's tapes are found buried in the spot where Heather Donahue's footage was supposed to have been found, Tristen sees a bizarre vision in the hospital of a little girl who was supposedly drowned by the Blair Witch, and it only gets worse when they get to Jeff's home. They see bizarre images in the footage that hint at something sinister having happened the night before, all of them find bizarre, symbol-like rashes that may point to them having been marked for death by some evil force, they began to have increasingly crazy and disturbing visions, and when they play the footage backwards, they discover that Tristen seems to have led them in a crazy ritual and orgy. Is the Blair Witch real, influencing and cursing all of them, and ultimately possessing Tristen at the end, or are they suffering from a severe mass delusion caused by their interest in the movie? Is everything that we see what actually happened, or is all the video footage the truth and the characters were so deluded, drunk, and stoned that they don't remember committing those acts? Like with the question of what was stalking the characters in the first movie, you never get an answer.
When the movie was released to home video, it was given a gimmick that made you wonder even more what exactly was going on and that was the secret of "Esrever," which is "reverse" spelled backwards. The video and DVD releases came with a featurette that encouraged viewers to watch certain scenes more closely to pick up hidden, almost subliminal words and images scattered throughout the film. It gave the clues "door," "water," "mirror," "grave," and, "rug," to hint at where such Easter eggs could be found. They were very easily miss them but, if you looked close enough at certain points in the film, you would see the words, "further," "me," "no," "seek," and, "or," and, once you put them in the right order, they spelled, "Seek me no further or..." You could then enter them into a special search bar on the Blair Witch website and get bragging rights by being added to a list of people who solved the puzzle. However, according to Good Bad Flicks on YouTube, there's another part of the sentence, which is said near the end of the film when Tristen speaks about widdershins. She says what sounds like a bunch of nonsense but, if you manage to right down what she's saying and reverse it, it reads, "The children will again walk free." When paired with the other sentence, it seems to suggest that the Blair Witch herself is giving a warning not to stop looking for her, lest you be tormented by the spirits of all the supposed dead children in her mythology until the day you die. Again, it was meant to make you question whether or not the Blair Witch is real in this movie's reality, but, unfortunately, you can't experience it nowadays. All of those subliminal messages were removed in later home video releases and TV airings (the shots of them here are taken from the Good Bad Flicks video on the film) and the search engine for those clues was deactivated in 2008.
Where Berlinger was going with this film was that he wanted to go into how obsession and fanaticism works and how, in marketing The Blair Witch Project as a documentation of something that actually happened, the filmmakers and the studio created an atmosphere where it was easy for such things to get out of hand. Indeed, you had many people who were fanatic about the possibility of it being real, only for many of them to become enraged when they learned that it was all fake, which, as I said in my review of the original film, says something not so flattering about the human condition if they were angry that the three people in that footage were really alive and well. And as is shown in the film, people from all around the world descended on the town of Burkittsville, not only giving it a lot of unwanted attention, similar to what The Amityville Horror did for that town (though I'd say it was worse in that case, since part of that story is real) but, in some cases, actually vandalizing it. Because of that, the house that was featured at the end of the movie was demolished so they wouldn't stop going there and messing around with it (that personally pisses me off, because I really liked that location). There's also a mention of the age-old question of whether violence in media breeds violence in reality, as near the end of the movie, when the characters are being taken into custody, you hear a reporter say, "Sadly, as has happened so many times before in this country, violent art has inspired real life violence." I'm sure it's not a coincidence that this was just over a year after the Columbine Massacre and the controversy about what those two killers were into prior to their rampage. It's also ironic, but not at all implausible, that the reporter would mention that, seeing as how there is no extreme onscreen violence in The Blair Witch Project.
Like I said at the beginning, I can appreciate what Berlinger was getting at and can respect him for not doing a simple retread of the first movie, as well as for not providing any real answers for what happens. But, that said, the story that's being told isn't that interesting to me. One reason is because I've seen this plot of a group of characters isolated in a claustrophobic setting and becoming increasingly paranoid and suspicious of each other done much better (i.e., John Carpenter's The Thing), as I have the notion of not knowing what's real or not (David Cronenberg's Videodrome, Jacob's Ladder, John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, and so on). Another is that I think Berlinger really went overboard with the visions that the characters were seeing and should have stuck more with elements that were related to The Blair Witch Project. I liked the idea of the characters seeing figures who were part of the Blair Witch mythology (a mysterious tree in the middle of the Parr ruins that shouldn't be there, a child who was drowned by the witch, the children whom Parr murdered, and Parr himself, who appears in the convenience store when Kim goes to buy some beer) and developing pagan-like symbols in the form of rashes on their bodies, but then, you have the owl crashing through the window, Erica and Stephen making out, only for her to slash up his torso, Kim seeing Jeff getting fried in the electric chair, and Jeff seeing Kim eating the owl at one point. I know it's meant to be a mass delusion but when you have stuff like that, I wonder, "What does this have to do with anything?" I also think this theme of fiction versus reality would have worked better and come off scarier if the movie were set 100% in the real world, rather than having the movie be fake but say that places and incidents tied to it, like Rustin Parr, his house, Coffin Rock, Elly Kedward etc., are and/or were real. And finally, I feel like the movie's deeper themes get a bit lost in the madness, because of the story's ambiguity. Though Berlinger wanted to show how easy it is for people to be manipulated and lose themselves in obsession and mass delusion (the latter of which does really happen, by the way), the fact that you never know for sure whether or not the Blair Witch is real or if what you see in the film or the video footage, if either, is what actually happened, dilutes that idea for me a little bit. Some may feel that's the beauty and genius of the movie, and they could be right and it's just too heady for me, but I thought this kind of ambiguity was more effective when it was attributed to strange sounds in the dark woods.
The studio's butchering of the film in post-production doesn't help my opinion of it either, and it sucks that, currently, the only way to see it is in this version. After filming wrapped, Artisan decided they were unhappy with what Berlinger delivered to them, as they wanted a more traditional horror film. First, they wanted more violence, and forced him to shoot the material involving the characters murdering the other tour group in their sleep, something that he never intended to have happen when he shot the scene where they're introduced. Second, they wanted more of a concrete villain for the movie and came up with the subplot of Jeff having been in a mental institution, making Berlinger shoot scenes of his time in there, although that proves to be superfluous since, by the end of the movie, the others are, seemingly, just as guilty of murder as he is. Third, they wanted the movie to start off more upfront about what it was going to be, rather than the steady progression into insanity that Berlinger intended. To that end, they replaced the original opening song, which was Frank Sinatra's Witchcraft, with Marilyn Manson's Disposable Teens. (It makes me wonder if they were also behind all of the other metal and rock songs featured in the movie, like Rob Zombie's Dragula, which is heard in the background of one scene.) They then re-cut the movie in a manner that made it very non-linear and needlessly confusing, showing brief clips of the group murdering the tourists, Jeff's time in the asylum, and the interrogation by the police sprinkled throughout, when the latter was supposed to come at the very end. This really undermines the flow of the story, as you're continually being jerked back and forth in the movie's timeline and getting hints that the group did something horrific, rather than being eased into it. Plus, when you see the massacre in its entirety at the end, it has little purpose other than shock value, as the characters still have no memory of doing it when they're interrogated afterward, and the interrogation at the end would have been just fine with them being charged for Erica and Tristen's deaths. In short, as is often the case, the studio's interference made the movie into a disorganized mess that you have to sift through. Oh, and the Book of Shadows title? That was all Artisan, even though it has no relevance to the story at all.
As unneeded as the added violence and gore were, at least they were conceived through some really good makeup works, as were other such effects, like Stephen's ripped up torso during that hallucination he has about Erica, the symbol-like rashes that appear on the characters' bodies, and Jeff's charred body when Kim has a vision of him being put to the electric chair. The owl that crashes through the window at one point and slowly dies on the floor, as well as the one that Jeff sees Kim munching on in a vision, were some really good props, courtesy of KNB, and the dream that Tristen has about murdering her baby is pulled off all too convincingly, with a lot of blood bubbling through the water and a glimmer of a tiny arm or leg (it's hard to tell which) poking through the surface. The visual effects, though not numerous at all, are a bit more of a mixed bag. Some of it looks fine, like the images that appear onscreen while they're going through the video footage and the spark effects during the aforementioned electric chair vision, but the effects used to create the herky-jerky movements of some of the figures seen by the characters haven't aged well and look like stuff you'd seen in TV docudrama series like A Haunting and such.
Amidst the opening montage of interviews with the residents of Burkittsville, we get our first introduction to Jeff, as he's being interviewed about how he first came to know the Blair Witch legend through the movie and about how he has a connection with those who believe in it. We then get a flashback to one year earlier, when Jeff was in the mental institution, and witness some of the stuff he had to endure while there. You see a long tube getting shoved through his left nostril (that kind of stuff gets to me, is I always wonder where it's all going) and the doctors funneling some kind of liquid down through it as a means of feeding him, followed by an injection to the arm that leaves him salivating while lying on the gurney; an orderly spraying him with the water from a powerful hose; Jeff knocking around and screaming in a padded cell while in a straight-jacket; and him sitting in a recreation area with a bunch of other inmates, before pounding a table with his fist and screaming. The movie switches again, this time to autumn in 1999, the opening credits set to Marilyn Manson's Disposable Teens as the camera swoops over the forests near Burkittsville, with brief shots of people being stabbed, tied up, sliced, and bloodied up interspersed among it. It then cuts to Jeff sitting in an interrogation room, when Sheriff Ronald Cravens and a detective walk in to talk to him. A caption shows that it's November 15, as the detective tells Jeff that they found blood in his van. The movie switches again, this time to the story's actual opening, as Jeff drives Stephen, Tristen, and Erica in his Blair Witch Hunt van, and drive to a local cemetery to pick up Kim, who's waiting for them there.
The first stop on their tour is the ruins of Rustin Parr's house, where they drive and hike to after stopping at a gas station/convenience store for supplies. As they talk about Parr, who claimed to have heard voices compelling him to kill, while driving to the spot, Kim mentions she hears voices all time, and we get random snippets of a guy's head getting bashed in. Also, as they hike up there, Kim seems to prove her psychic abilities by revealing to Tristen that she knows she's pregnant. Once at the ruins, Jeff videotapes Tristen looking at some markings on the inside of one of the foundation's walls, when she asks him about a creepy tree in the middle of it. Jeff doesn't even know it's there at first, and when he sees it, he swears that it was never there before and that it's being in the middle of what would have been the house's living room doesn't make sense, but the others think it's a poor attempt by him to freak them out. He and Kim look warily at the tree, as we get more glimpses of a slaughter, this time with a woman running and close-up of someone's torso being gutted. After that, while Erica casts a Wiccan windershins spell, Jeff sets up surveillance cameras all around the ruins, hoping to catch an image of the Blair Witch. Everyone then sets up camp and, come nightfall, they're gathered around a campfire, smoking weed, drinking beer, and discussing the finer points of The Blair Witch Project and its mythology, why Wiccans and Goths shouldn't be judged solely on their looks, and, in Stephen and Tristen's case, what exactly myth is and whether or not it has any basis in history or reality.
Suddenly, their party is interrupted by a piercing scream that echoes through the woods. They turn off the radio they were listening to and hear someone shout nearby. Jeff grabs his own video camera and moves to the edge of the ruins, when he's suddenly blinded by a light that's shined in his eyes. Another group of people walk into the spot, one of whom is holding his own camera and pointing it at Jeff. The guy explains that they have a tour group of their own, the Blair Witch Walk, and Jeff tells him that they're doing the same thing. The leader of the group gets angry at his partner, whom he says is supposed to keep an eye out for stuff like this, and both groups start arguing about who's going to be staying there that night. Seeing that things could potentially turn violent, Stephen walks up and tries to diffuse the situation, saying that they'll be gone by dawn, as they saw something at Coffin Rock that really shook them up. The others, seeing where he's going, playing along with him, and this piques the interest of the tourists being led by the group. The girl of a Chinese couple asks their hosts to take them to Coffin Rock, while a German woman tells them, "I didn't come all the way from Berlin to look at some old trees. I paid a lot of money to see something." With that, the leaders decide to appease their paying customers and lead them off into the woods. Watching them go, the group can barely contain themselves, as Stephen drunkenly intones, "They were never seen again. Their footage was found a year later... underexposed and useless." Having taken care of that little annoyance, everybody prepares to continue partying, though Jeff wonders what will happen if they come back after learning they've been tricked. Kim, however, says she has a feeling that they won't come back. The party then continues well into the night, as they get more and more drunk, stoned, and wild. The scene ends with Kim lying back on one of the foundation's walls, as we get more snippets of a massacre, as she notices an owl looking at her strangely from where it sits up in a tree. It seems to disappear within her blinks and the scene fades to black.
It opens back up on something that initially appears innocuous: Tristen walking down to a stream the next morning, carrying a towel, and apparently preparing to take a bath. But, instead of taking her clothes off, she walks straight into the water, stopping at a fairly deep spot, and shoving the towel under the surface. The movie cuts to a close-up of the towel, as it unravels under the water, and blood bubbles up to the surface, with a tiny human limb just barely poking through. It's then revealed that it was a dream, as Tristen is still sleeping with Stephen at the campsite. A wide shot of the camp shows what appears to be white confetti raining down like snow on the sleeping campers. They slowly wake up, Jeff looking down and realizing that the personal camera he was holding is now torn in half, while Stephen and Tristen discover that the "confetti" is all of their research, ripped to shreds. Jeff then discovers that all of his surveillance cameras are ripped up as well. Everyone tries to figure out what happened, as they planned to stay awake all night but appeared to have blacked out at some point. Jeff figures the other tour group came back while they were out and destroyed their equipment out of revenge for fooling them, but Kim says the equipment looks more like it was chewed up. She also says that the tapes are still there, as she can see them in her mind. Nobody takes her seriously, until she points out the spot where she says they're located: the spot where the footage in the movie was supposedly found. Again, everyone is incredulous about her claims but Jeff, for the heck of it, looks under the rocky foundation. When he first moves some of the large stones aside, he doesn't see anything, but Kim tells him to reach in and, sure enough, when he does, he finds and pulls out all of his tapes. Jeff confronts Kim about how she knew they were in there, while Tristen, who said that she doesn't feel so well, slowly slumps down against a wall, saying they need to leave. An argument breaks out, as Erica and Stephen, suspecting Jeff, wonder why the other tour group didn't destroy the footage as well, while Tristen slumps down to the ground, moaning to Stephen that she wants to leave. Everyone stops arguing when they see Tristen put her hand on her face, leaving a streak of blood on it as she removes it. She looks down and sees that the blood is pooling from her crotch area.
The film briefly cuts back to the interrogation, with Jeff being told about the blood in the van, which he says is from Tristen suffering her miscarriage, and we then see them rushing to the hospital in Jeff's van. At the hospital, Tristen is promptly wheeled in on a gurney, the doctor asking Stephen how she got so cold and he explains that they were out camping. After Jeff is interrogated and blamed for what happened by Sheriff Cravens, Tristen is shown lying in her bed, distraught over losing the baby, as a nurse tells her that the doctor wants her to stay until her temperature goes down. The nurse pulls back the curtain next to her bed, revealing the bizarre image of a young girl in centuries old clothes, with black eyes and soaking wet from head to toe. The figure walks backwards in a freakish, shaking manner, before disappearing into thin air. This is followed by more glimpses of people getting slaughtered, and when Stephen comes in to check on her, she tells him that she's not staying there. Once they get her discharged, the group drives up to Jeff's home in the Black Woods in order to go over the footage and find out what happened during the time they blacked out. Arriving there, and explaining how he managed to acquire the old, abandoned factory for just a dollar, Jeff leads them across the bridge that spans the ravine the building sits in; he says it's safe but warns them not to lean on the railing. Back to the interrogation, as we get more bad acting from Cravens, who gives us this gem as he walks around Jeff: " I am not a... gambling man... but... I would bet my entire... retirement pension... that the blood in the van... is gonna match those tourists." After Jeff says he's been trying to blame something on him since he was a kid, we cut back to the story, with Jeff opening the door to his home and telling everyone to rush inside, that the dogs they suddenly hear barking will eat them up. Once they're in, he closes the door behind them, and the barking starts as suddenly as it began. He opens and closes the door several times, revealing it's just a burglar alarm, but says that the surveillance camera they see on the wall is real and recording; Kim takes the opportunity to give it two middle fingers and make faces at it. Jeff leads them down the main hallway, showing off a bunch of equipment that he somehow managed to get his hands on and which he sells on eBay, as well as a number of spare camcorders. That's when he shows off the main hub of his online store, which Erica is not impressed with but Kim thinks is cool. Jeff shows Stephen and Tristen to his own bedroom, and once they've retired, Kim comments to him, "They never should have let you out. You're a long way from sane." This leads to another quick shot of Jeff in the asylum.
While Jeff, Kim, and Erica start going over the footage, Tristen tells Stephen about the vision she had at the hospital, which was identical to someone mentioned in the Blair Witch's Black Bible, and about the dream of her murdering the baby. Meanwhile, as they look at the footage, Erica realizes that the big tree that was in the middle of the ruins is not there; instead, it's just a skinny little twig of a tree. Jeff tells Kim to hand him another DV cassette to try for a different angle, but when she turns to get it, he notices a bizarre rash on her shoulder. She figures it's just chaffing from her backpack and says that it just itches a little. She hands him the cassette and Jeff switches it, when Kim sees a quick flash of an image on the monitor. Jeff didn't see it but rewinds it back and it's pulled back up, with a brief flash of some figures lying on the ground in a circular pattern, akin to a pentagram. When he sees it, Stephen, who's joined them in the loft, says that it reminds him of Coffin Rock and the murders that occurred there in the legend in 1886. Jeff tries to get the image back so they can have another look at it, when they hear Tristen calling for Stephen. He goes back to the bedroom, only to find that Tristen is fast asleep. He then hears the sound of kids crying outside and walks to the front door, hearing that it's coming from beyond it. He unlocks the door, dealing with the dog alarm, and sees an image of a girl, similar to the one Tristen saw, walking backwards down the bridge before disappearing completely. Freaked out at this, he almost runs back inside, but when he turns back around and looks, he sees no sign of what he just saw. Once back inside, Jeff goes to Tristen and learns that she heard the sound of the children as well, saying that she thought it was part of a nightmare she was having about her killing some kids for looking up her skirt as she was twirling around. Stephen thinks they need to go home and says he'll get someone to drive them to the airport in the morning, but Tristen says she doesn't want to leave until she understands what happened. He tries to give her some pills to help her sleep, getting angry and yelling at her to do so when she refuses. We get another cut back to the interrogation, as a tearful Stephen insists to a detective, "It was an accident. I swear to Christ it was an accident!"
Jeff and Erica are watching the footage, when suddenly there's a flash on the screen and the time code briefly jumps from 1:32 to 3:57 before going back again. Though he doesn't know how it happened, Jeff does know that jump was during the time they fell asleep. At Kim's suggestion, Jeff goes back to the brief time jump and slows it down. He's able to stop a point where the see-through image of a naked woman, swinging around the tree in the middle of the ruins, is visible. Perplexed, he attempts to re-digitize the footage so he can blow the image up, sending Erica to get him and Kim some coffee and booze respectively. Looking through Jeff's small fridge, Erica finds nothing but stale coffee, old takeout food, and no booze whatsoever. She notices Stephen sitting at a nearby table, deep in troubled thought, and when she asks what's wrong, he says that he and Tristen are leaving in the morning. He proves to be very, very tense when she asks him why, if Tristen is the one who's in bad shape, why he's the one who seems to be having a nervous breakdown, as he slaps the table and yells at her. He instantly apologizes, saying he feels like his world is falling apart, and Erica attempts to make him feel better by massaging his shoulders. Things quickly get sensual, as she moves her hands down lower and massages him on his sides, which he clearly likes. She then starts licking and kissing his neck and, within a second, the two of them are making out passionately, with Stephen clearing the table and laying Erica down on it to kiss and lick at her neck and cleavage, while she claws up the back of his shirt. They stand back up and Erica rips his shirt open, revealing that he has a couple of rash-like symbols on both sides of his abdomen. She asks him if they hurt and he says they're just a little warm. She says she has them too, and slices open huge, bleeding cuts on his torso. Stephen looks down at them, as they gush blood, and looks up at Erica, who has a perplexed look on her face. A cut to a wide-shot reveals that they're sitting on either side of the table, as if none of that happened, and it apparently didn't, as Stephen's shirt is intact and Erica has no blood on her fingernails. Kim then calls them both up to the editing loft.
Up there, Kim tells them that Jeff was able to get a better angle on the naked woman in the footage and shows them a close-up of her dancing with her back to the camera, rocking the image back and forth. Looking at it, Stephen asks Jeff if he can make the woman's face visible and Jeff does so... revealing it to be Erica. Flabbergasted, Erica thinks it's some kind of sick joke on their part but they assure her that's not the case and they were hoping she could explain it. But, Erica says she has no memory of doing that and storms off to her room to be alone. None of them are sure if they believe Erica or not, while Kim asks Jeff for the keys to the van, saying that she needs to get out in order to go get some beer. She goes to check on Erica and finds her sitting on the floor in her room, in the middle of some lit candles, rocking back and forth and repeating the same Wicca prayer over and over again. Erica tells her that they brought something with them and lifts up her blouse, showing her the rash-like symbols on her abdomen. Kim believes it's just something like poison oak but when Erica tells her that they're growing, she looks at the one on her right shoulder and finds more of those symbols there. We get more flashes of a slaughter, as Erica tells Kim that these symbols mean you've been marked for death by a witch. In the next scene, Kim goes to the convenience store and gas station they stopped at the previous day. On the way in, she gets hassled by some perverted townspeople outside the front door, and inside, when she walks over to the cooler and grabs a park of beers, she looks down at the handyman on the floor who's repairing. The man (who is meant to be Rustin Parr, by the way) looks up at Kim and says, "I'm finished now." As she walks to the counter, a woman comes up behind Kim and purposefully knocks the back of her legs with a cart, telling Kim she's with the "witch people" before shoving the cart aside and storming off. Kim goes to the counter, only for the cashier woman to ignore her and go on reading her newspaper. Learning that she's also the manager, Kim suggests to the woman, Peggy, to tell the cashier to do her job and Peggy, in turn, threatens to throw her out, saying they don't want people like her around. Aggravated, Kim puts the beers in a paper bag herself, as Peggy hits a switch that turns on the surveillance camera. She again tells Kim to get out, grabbing her arm, and Kim grabs her throat and threatens to rip her throat if she touches her again. She throws some money in Peggy's face and tells her to keep the change, as she storms out of the store and back to the van.
Back at Jeff's home, Erica is still desperately saying her Wicca prayer, while in her bedroom, Tristen is looking at her reflection in a window, as an owl looks at her from outside. Jeff is shown watching and listening to Erica's breakdown on a surveillance monitor up in his loft. On her way back from town, Kim his the brakes when a rock smashes through the van's back window and sees some crazy townspeople throwing stones at her, calling her a witch. She speeds down the road, only to see a bunch of children up ahead, and she swerves to miss them. This causes her to crash into a tree off the side of the road, and when she gets out, she sees that she just bent the van's fender a little bit. Looking up and down the road, she sees no sign of the children she tried to avoid running over, but the sound of children crying can be heard echoing through the night. She quickly climbs back into the van and gets back on the road. Once back at Jeff's home, Kim walks in, sets her bag down, and reaches in to pull the pack of beer out. She ends up pricking her finger on something sharp, and when she pulls the pack out, she finds a bloody nail file stuck among the bottles. She hears Jeff ask her to make him a pot of coffee and, in the next scene, she brings it to him. Put off when she gets no response from him when she sets it down on his table, she sits on the couch behind his chair and tells him about damaging his van when she swerved to avoid some children. She goes on to tell him that she's sure those children are the ones whom Rustin Parr murdered. Jeff's chair swivels around and Kim sees a freakish image of him getting fried in the electric chair. Instantly, things go back to normal and Jeff, again, asks for the coffee. Kim points out to him that it's on the table beside him and he pours some into his cup, as the film transitions to the following day.
Stephen and Erica prepare to leave, as she's the one who's going to drive him and Tristen to the airport. Erica goes to get the van's keys from Jeff, while Stephen goes to fetch Tristen, both of them remembering the bizarre shared hallucination they both experienced the night before. Packing his stuff up, Stephen wakes up Tristen, who still isn't ready to go home, but Stephen doesn't listen to her. He goes back outside, calling for Erica, only to learn from Jeff that she's not up there. Jeff asks him to go check outside at the van, when they both look out the window and see that the van is a complete disaster, with the front caved in. Jeff points it out to Kim, who says that it wasn't that severe the night before, when Tristen shows up, talking about a dream she had about kids dipping their hands in blood and pressing it on their bodies. She says that Jeff had the same dream and points up at him. Jeff lifts up his shirt, revealing the same symbols on his abdomen that everyone else has. It then dawns on them that Erica isn't present and they search everywhere for her. When Kim looks in her room, she finds her clothes, including her pentagram necklace, on the floor, in the middle of the circle of candles from the previous night, but no sign of Erica herself, not even when she looks outside. We get another, meaningless cut to the interrogation, one where Kim uses the two-way mirror in the room she's being held in to see that the rash on her shoulder is gone, before Sheriff Cravens walks in. Back to the actual story, as they wonder where Erica is, Jeff accuses Kim and her of being in some kind of prank, while Kim says that she thinks something bad happened to her. Tristen suggests that Erica might have called someone and so, Jeff calls the minister who Erica said was her father. All he gets is his secretary, who tells him that the minister has no children at all, excommunicated or otherwise. Everyone is then back in the loft, discussing and arguing about what's going on, with Stephen suggesting that it's a shared delusion, when another image pops up in the video footage. When Jeff rewinds it, as Kim tells him, they see a quick flash of someone destroying one of Jeff's cameras, apparently proving his belief that the other tour group were the perpetrators. He gets a phone call, which is from Cravens, who's at a crime scene, and tells him to turn on his TV. Though Jeff isn't interested, he gets Kim to turn on the TV, specifically to the news, and they see a report about the discovery of the murdered tour group, whose bodies were found at Coffin Rock. Cravens, who's calling from the scene, tells Jeff that the victims were disemboweled, that he didn't find the camera equipment, and that he's a suspect. He forbids him and the others from leaving the county until he says otherwise. At that very moment, an owl comes smashing through the window and Jeff, Kim, and Stephen rush down, looking at it right before it dies. They look up at the loft at Tristen, who's watching them with a bizarre expression.
Now, everyone is paranoid, especially Jeff, who tells the others that they're not leaving him to take the fall for what happened and that they're not getting out of his sight. He also doesn't believe Kim saying that it's some evil force they brought back from the woods; rather, he thinks it's Erica and her witchcraft. This pisses Kim off to where she stomps away from Jeff. Another cut to the interrogation, where Cravens makes Kim wipe off her makeup, while she tries to explain that something evil happened to them in the woods, and then, we're back to the story. Jeff walks up to Kim, briefly seeing a vision of her eating the owl that crashed through the window earlier, but then, it's shown that she's actually just eating some chicken legs. Tristen says that Erica's outside but, when everyone looks out there, they don't see anything. They walk away, but Tristen implores Stephen to look again, and when he does, he now sees Erica, dancing around a small, thin tree in nothing but her underwear. He rushes to the front door and opens it to see Erica on the bridge. But, when he approaches her, she backs away, cryptically telling him that he knows who "it" is and what he has to do. She rounds the corner of the bridge's end and walks away, right as it snaps in half under Stephen's feet. He manages to grab onto the half that's hanging underneath the front door and starts climbing his way back up. Looking behind him, at the other side of the ravine, he sees a young girl, who repeats what Erica told him in her voice. Tristen appears in the doorway above him but ignores his pleas for help and walks back inside, Jeff and Kim having to help him up. In the next scene, Tristen is twirling around in a circle on her bed, babbling about some "bastard boys" who hanged "her." Stephen comes in and tries to calm her down, but Tristen tells him that she's having Elly Kedward's dreams and goes on a tangent about how the aforementioned boys tormented her when she was tied to a tree after being banished from the village and ultimately hung her. When he finally gets her to calm down, Tristen says that she thinks she's going crazy, but Stephen assures her that she's not, as he embraces her.
The whole time, Jeff is watching them on his security monitor in his loft, quickly switching it off when Kim comes up. Worried about Tristen, she says she thinks they need to call the hospital and he tells her there's a phone book in the desk drawer. Opening the drawer up, she does find some Yellow Pages, but she also finds something unsettling: detailed, leather-bound files with a lot of information about all of them. Stephen comes up just as Kim confronts Jeff with the files, slamming them in his lap. Jeff claims to not know where they came from, but when Stephen sees them, he grabs Jeff and slams him against his workstation, demanding to know how he got them. There's a brief cut to the interrogation, where Stephen is confronted with the files himself (God, these cuts mess up the flow of the movie), and when we get back to the story, Jeff's phone rings. It's Cravens again, saying he needs to talk to him, and when Jeff says that his van is trashed, the sheriff says he's at his front door stoop and yells for him to get out. Confused about how he could be there, given that the bridge is out, Jeff flips on one of his security monitors and it shows that the bridge is now intact again (it's not important but I can't help but notice how, during this whole scene, you can hear Rob Zombie's Dragula playing in the background). Jeff walks down the hall to the front door, getting flashes of his time in the asylum as he hears Cravens pounding on the door, angrily yelling at him to open up. Jeff walks up to the door, listening to see if Cravens really is out there, and when he continues to hear him, he slowly unlatches the door and flings it open. Instead of Cravens, he's faced with a collapsed bridge and some dogs barking viciously at him on the other side of the ravine. Seeing this, Jeff slams the door, grabs a rifle out of the nearby closet, and opens the door back up, only to find that the dogs are gone. He closes the door again, as Stephen and Kim show up and shocked to see him with the gun. He goes to put the gun back in the closet but, when he opens it, he finds Erica standing in there, her back to him. At first, he's relieved that they've found her, but when she doesn't respond to his talking to her, he turns her around and finds that she's dead.
Back up in the loft, the three of them are, once again, pointing fingers at each other about who killed Erica: Jeff thinks it's Stephen, since he's the last one who saw her alive, while Stephen says that the last time he saw her, she was on her way to see Jeff. Just as Kim asks where Tristen was this whole time, she slowly walks up the stairs to the loft and starts talking about everything being backwards, mentioning widdershins. She starts saying words backwards, and Jeff is about to write her off as completely crazy, when Kim suggests running the video footage backwards. As incredulous as he is, Jeff does it. At first, nothing happens, but Stephen suggests putting the keystrokes in backwards. When Jeff does this, again, it appears to do nothing, but then, static comes up and they then find themselves watching footage of them acting completely crazy and animal-like. They see themselves taking their clothes off, appearing to worship Tristen in some fanatical fashion, ripping up their research and trashing their equipment (that shot of Jeff screaming into the camera is probably this movie's most well-known image, as it's on the poster and video covers), taking part in a crazed orgy, and Tristen, who's dressed in black the whole time, appearing to indoctrinate them in a cult-like ritual, before they run off in the nude. The footage then shows Tristen, after doing something with an owl, placing the footage in the spot where they found it, before gesturing with her hands, turning to one of the surveillance cameras, walking up to it, and putting her face right up to it, smiling evilly (an image that's meant to be this film's twist on the iconic one of Heather Donahue from the original). She appears to fling the camera to the ground and the footage goes back to normal. Everyone then confronts Tristen, who has her back to the monitors, about what they just saw.
She admits she wasn't watching the screen and tries to walk away, but Stephen and Kim grab her, while Jeff grabs a camcorder and asks Tristen what she did to Erica. Tristen pleads with Stephen, asking why he's letting this happen, as Jeff tries to get her to admit to the camera that she killed Erica. Stephen makes a comment about her having hurt their baby, as the Blair Witch kills children, but Tristen says she hasn't killed anyone, and wrenches free of their grip, walking to the railing behind the workstation. Stephen grabs her from behind, trying to get her to confess, but Tristen manages to throw him back with a sudden burst of strength, flips him the bird, and, with a new, defiant, flippant attitude, tells them, "You're all gonna fucking die." She then beckons them to follow her up to the loft's second level, as she mocks them, saying they're too afraid to learn the truth, just like the children of the village of Blair. Jeff proclaims her to be the witch, Tristen following that up with, "Is that what you think, crazy boy?", and when Stephen tries to get her to talk, she feigns being herself, nuzzling him, only to suddenly slap him across the face. She proclaims that Tristen is gone, as Kim pushes her away from Stephen, while Jeff climbs up to them. Tristen grabs a rope, loops it around her neck, and ties it tight, telling Stephen that whatever happens is up to him. Kim asks why she killed Erica but, instead of answering, Tristen sniffs her and says she can smell her fear. She mocks her, saying that she can't kill her, and flicks her chest (like Kim did with Peggy the other night), calling her "Kimmy." This enrages Kim, who threatens to rip her head off, but Tristen fires back with, "Then fucking do it!" Stephen steps in, trying to stop it, but Tristen starts mocking him, calling him weak, pathetic, and with no balls. In a rage, Stephen shoves her and she falls over the railing behind her. Her breaks instantly, as we're shown the full revelation that the group murdered the other tourists, beating them senseless, chasing them down, tying one to a tree and castrating him, and stabbing, gutting, and disemboweling them. As they watch Tristen's body hang, Jeff continues filming in it, as flashes of his time in the asylum run through his head.
The same reporter from before reports on the arrest of the group at the building, saying that they committed several "ritualistic murders" after watching The Blair Witch Project. Another reporter mentions how Jeff's van has blood evidence that could link him and the others to the murders and, as the van is filmed, it's revealed to be completely intact. The sequence of the group being driven to the jail and taken in, with the media frantically trying to get the best shots of them and onlookers trying catch a glimpse, is inter-cut with the various interrogations. Cravens tells Jeff that he's had his videotapes edited together and that they tell the whole story and Jeff is confident that they'll see how crazy Tristen was. Stephen finds a couple of photos of the murder victims at Coffin Rock in the file given to him and tells the investigator that he has no memory of taking part in their murder. Kim is asked about Peggy, the cashier, and is shown her bloody nail file, as well as a photo of her, dead at her counter. When asked about Erica, Jeff says that Tristen killed her after she was possessed by the Blair Witch. Stephen is faced with a photo of Tristen's hanging body and he insists that it was an accident, that she put the rope around her neck and that she taunted him into killing her. He then remembers that Jeff taped the whole thing and that they'll see what happened if they just watch the tapes. All three of them are then faced with various footage of their crimes. Kim denies having murdered Peggy, but is then shown surveillance footage of her stabbing her to death and leaving her to bleed out on her counter. Jeff is shown footage from his own surveillance cameras of him dragging Erica's body into the closet, placing it there, and closing the door, all while completely naked. He says that's not how it happened and it's not him. Finally, Stephen is faced with the most damning evidence of all: Jeff's tape of Tristen's final moments. Instead of showing her seemingly possessed by an evil, taunting spirit, the footage shows a frightened woman being accused of being a witch and chased up into the loft's upper level by her friends, as she begs for them to stop. The footage ends with Stephen yelling for Tristen to confess, as she has the rope looped around her neck, before pushing her over the railing to fall to her death. As they coldly watch her hang, Stephen turns to the camera and says, "Fucking witch." In the interrogation room, Stephen loses his mind at this, saying that someone messed with the tape and screaming, "That's fucking bullshit!" The movie ends on that, the ending credits playing over aerial footage of mourners walking into the woods.
Carter Burwell, the Coen Brothers' go to composer, did the movie's actual score and, as is often the case with him, what he came up with was something that's very subtle but, when you listen to it, is also quite unusual. The way he came up with the score was very unconventional, as he went into the woods, recorded sounds like snapping sticks and tossed rocks, and created numerous weird sounds out of them in his studio. The theme for the opening scene of Jeff in the mental asylum, for example, has a bizarre, twanging beat to it, rising to a pitch that involves clanging sounds. You hear freakish, high-pitched sounds when Jeff first notices the tree in the middle of the Parr ruins, rocks and twigs clicking during the scene where Erica tells Tristen about how Elly Kedward was actually a good witch, an oddball, picking and twanging theme for when Tristen has the nightmare about murdering her baby, and so on. Like I said, it's unusual, but it's also very, very subtle, often lying just under the surface and is something you're not likely to notice unless you really listen for it.
The same can't be said for the songs featured on the movie's soundtrack, which are made up of a bunch of rock and metal songs. I've already mentioned Marilyn Manson's Disposable Teens, which plays on the opening credits, and while I normally can't stand Manson or his style of music, that song isn't that bad, and I feel the same way about Rob Zombie's Dragula. Feel Good Hit of the Summer by Queens of the Stone Age, which plays over the latter part of the group's party in the woods, is fitting in that it's a weird song for a surreal scene. The same goes for Marvin Pontiac's I'm a doggy, which plays when Stephen and Erica suddenly start making out. I couldn't hear the horny lyrics over the characters' dialogue but I could definitely hear that harmonica solo that goes with it and it helped to make that scene be as bizarre as it possibly could be. And Poe's Haunted, which plays over the first part of the ending credits, has an appropriately sad sound to it, given the situation we've just seen play out. There are many other songs on the soundtrack but those are the ones that stuck out at me from the actual movie.
Joe Berlinger may have had good, artistic intentions in mind when he set out to make what ultimately became Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, only for them to be compromised after the fact by the studio, but even if his original vision ever does get released, I don't know if it would change my opinion on the movie. I can compliment it with some of the characters, the way it's shot, the locations and settings, the makeup effects, some of the visual effects, the subtle, oddball music score, and some of the songs on the soundtrack, but at the same time, some of the acting isn't all that great, the film is a jumbled mess thanks to Artisan's meddling and bad editing, and, interference or not, I don't think Berlinger's most significant theme comes through all that well. I certainly respect what he was trying to do and say with the sequel, as well as for going a completely different route with it, but I think the sheer random craziness of the characters' visions, the fact that some aspects of the Blair Witch legend are shown to be real in this reality, and the total ambiguity of what's real and what isn't ultimately swallow it up and make you forget what he was supposed to be going for. I've said before, this movie may just be way too intellectual and heady for me in the long run but, aside from those who wanted more of the same, I can understand why people were put off by it when it was released and why it came and went as fast as it did.
It appears I'm one of the few that liked this film. Sure I wish we could see the original cut.
ReplyDeleteIt might be interesting to see the original cut, but, as I said, I don't know if it would make me like the movie any more.
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