{"id":259,"date":"2016-08-18T15:22:39","date_gmt":"2016-08-18T15:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joshuagooch.com\/?p=259"},"modified":"2016-08-18T15:55:48","modified_gmt":"2016-08-18T15:55:48","slug":"the-terrible-clever-book-of-shadows-blair-witch-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshuagooch.com\/?p=259","title":{"rendered":"The Terrible, Clever Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been prepping a course on horror films over the summer. While reading through materials on The Blair Witch Project<\/em>, I decided it was time to rewatch Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.<\/em> I saw this film in an actual theater in the year 2000 and could only recall 1) that it was terrible, and 2) it had aerial footage of the forest floor at the beginning and end of the film. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\n

Why? Because Joe Berlinger directed it. I had no idea who he was in 2000, but I now know him as the talented documentarian responsible for films like Crude<\/em>, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster<\/em>, and the three Paradise Lost<\/em> films about the West Memphis Three. What in the world, I wondered, led Berlinger to direct this terrible film.<\/p>\n

The answer, at least according to Berlinger\u2019s director\u2019s commentary, is that he imagined the studio would allow him to create \u201ca taut psychological thriller\u201d radically different from its predecessor. It seems obvious, though, that they hired Berlinger because he was a noted documentarian, and they imagined someone with his resume could quickly produce a film in time for a Halloween release.\u00a0If it had\u00a0Blair Witch\u00a0<\/em>in the title, then they figured it would make them some money. In essence, they wanted\u00a0BWP\u00a0<\/em>to become something like\u00a0Halloween,\u00a0<\/em>a monetizable franchise.<\/p>\n

The demand for quick turnaround seems to be why they allowed Berlinger to make a film that essentially attacks\u00a0the first film for the problems that it\u00a0posed to documentary filmmaking. In his commentary, Berlinger struggles to be complimentary about BWP<\/em>. Toward the end, he says that he thought selling the original film as a documentary was \u201cnot right,\u201d and then describes the\u00a0conflation of fact and fiction in its marketing as \u201cevil.\u201d That’s not what sequel directors usually say about the wildly successful film that’s the basis for their new film.\u00a0But\u00a0it is this problem\u00a0of\u00a0the indetermination of fact and fiction that Berlinger makes the thematic core of BoS<\/em>, and in doing so, effectively monkeywrenches the BWP<\/em> as monetizable\u00a0property for Artisan.<\/p>\n

Whether that was his intention or the outcome of the studio\u2019s interventions in the film\u2019s final cut is\u00a0unclear. At the very least, the key conceit of Berlinger\u2019s film would pose a significant problem for the franchise. After all, he wanted to begin BoS<\/em>\u00a0by discussing the success of BWP as an explicitly fictional film, and then to build a new film about the ways in which fictional representations affect the people who\u00a0cannot distinguish them from reality. I’d guess\u00a0the studio okayed\u00a0his initial script for sheer expediency, fully intending to insist later–as they did–that he remove references to\u00a0the first film being\u00a0fictional.<\/p>\n

On first viewing, the elimination of the fictionality of the\u00a0BWP<\/em>\u00a0makes BoS<\/em>\u00a0incoherent. On reflection, though, the\u00a0change also undermines the realist pretenses that the first film achieved through both plot and form\u2014most especially, first person shaky cam\u2014more than Berlinger\u2019s initial idea. The plot in a nutshell: a BWP tour group blacks out in the woods and awakes to find themselves embroiled in either a supernatural plot or a murderous group hysteria. Berlinger uses 35mm film for character perspectives as they experience supernatural terrors, and ends the film with the surviving group members confronted by video footage that shows them committing the horrors they imagined had been perpetrated by a supernatural entity. \u201cSomeone got to the tapes!\u201d one of the men shouts, and the film ends.<\/p>\n

The conceit here is that, while characters in the film imagine that video can\u2019t lie, savvy viewers\u00a0know\u00a0that it can. It\u2019s no mistake that Berlinger mentions\u00a0the OJ Simpson case in his commentary. This is a very ’90s documentary concern. That said, it seems unlikely that this move\u00a0to create\u00a0ambiguity for horror audiences would have worked for either the studio or for test audiences unless they either knew of or were Bill Nichols. Judging by the edits, it’s clear they didn’t and weren’t.<\/p>\n

So it’s possible that the film\u00a0made more sense\u00a0when (or if) the film had a clearer division, narratively and formally, between fiction and fact. The final version, however, not only lacks a clear distinction between the two but has also worked overtime through its interpositions of gory cutaways and mental ward flashbacks to set up its characters as guilty and unreliable. Berlinger tells us that the studio demanded these cutaways\u2014they wanted more gore and to heighten the villainy of one main character. (How badly did they want them? He tells us they\u00a0were shot five weeks before the film\u2019s international premiere on over 3,000 screens.) This alteration refracts fictionality across all levels of its plot\u00a0and\u00a0essentially monkeywrenched the\u00a0BWP <\/em>as a franchise.<\/p>\n

Why? It is impossible for viewers to believe either version of the film\u2019s events. When I left the theater in 2000, I didn\u2019t ponder for one moment the question that Berlinger wanted me to ponder. I wasn’t wondering\u00a0what had really happened to those characters. Of course, that question would have been in keeping with the first film. We don\u2019t know what happened but we\u2019re left to wonder. Berlinger\u2019s plan\u00a0for the sequel\u00a0attempted to make\u00a0audiences think about this problem from a more ethical position, one informed by his work as a documentarian.<\/p>\n

But I didn\u2019t think about that at all when I left the theater. What I thought was, \u201cWhat a terrible film.\u201d Where the first film threatened to break out of its narrative space, then, the sequel collapsed the myth entirely, in\u00a0large part because the studio insisted that it\u00a0include more gore and less uncertainty. The result is a bad fiction film.<\/p>\n

But bad films don\u2019t typically end franchises. That this one did\u2014for sixteen years\u2014is what makes it interesting.<\/p>\n

Part of the trouble is that\u00a0Berlinger seems to have wanted the film to be read in and against the grain of the documentary tradition. Fair enough. That\u2019s what is interesting about the film, and it clearly mattered to him because of the problems to documentary ethics posed by the first film. But audiences came to this film as a horror\u00a0movie. If he’d raised these concerns in an entertaining horror movie, there would be no problem. But this emphasis on documentary\u00a0is what\u00a0poses aesthetic and thematic problems in imagining subsequent films.<\/p>\n

In terms of aesthetics, BoS<\/em> shows that the camera eye of documentary is almost\u00a0alien to horror. BWP\u00a0<\/em>overcame this because of its highly subjective shots.\u00a0BoS\u00a0<\/em>avoided this approach because it seemed both a bad form of documentary aesethics and too readily parodied to Berlinger.\u00a0But the horror films that he\u00a0references as influences–The Shining<\/em>, Rosemary\u2019s Baby<\/em>–port viewers into the\u00a0hallucinations of its characters through tight focalization. The clean\u00a0camera work in BoS<\/em> is the hallmark of a well-shot documentary, but it is largely too detached from characters.<\/p>\n

The best sequence in conveying a group experience is the 35mm campfire montage, which conveys a group feeling (i.e.,\u00a0getting wasted in the woods). The film struggles to manage this visually\u00a0otherwise, in large part because it\u00a0wants to give us a visualization of\u00a0a group hallucination. This\u00a0makes the construction\u00a0of narrow\u00a0focalization almost impossible. The whole film has to become a hallucination–or, what it seems at times, a parody of itself. Kubrick managed it in The Shining<\/em> by making nearly every shot a creepy experience of ghostly visual floating, and Argento does it in Suspiria<\/em> through similar killer camera mobility. BoS<\/em>\u00a0has no engagement with the camera as the perspective of a terrifying threat. It’s a medium, with all the fallibility of mediums. That\u00a0empties the visual field of the fact\/fiction question. It’s a question of how viewers relate to the medium.<\/p>\n

It also matters that BoS<\/em> was scripted and BWP<\/em> was the result of long form improvisations carefully edited together. This conjunction of a scripted follow-up to BWP<\/em> combined with the visually flatness of this fact\/fiction problem make it difficult to see where one might push another film.<\/p>\n

It\u00a0also cuts at the heart of the first film. In BWP<\/em>, video is medial mark of truth, and the \u201cdirectors\u201d largely abusive methods for coercing Method-style performances from their actors relied on their ability to improv. BoS<\/em>\u00a0unmasks that performance and the attempt to make video a medial guarantee of truth. The crucial video undermines its explanatory power: the video of their blood orgy in the woods includes footage of one of the women hiding under the rocks the video of her hiding the video under the rocks. I’d guess that Berlinger\u00a0means to\u00a0reference a recurrent truth problem for documentary, reenactment. (In fact, the title card tells audiences that the film is just such a reenactment.) If one wishes to believe the video, then one has to believe that she hid it twice, once for the camera, once for sure. This is\u00a0Blair Witch Project\u00a0<\/em>as directed by Robert\u00a0Flaherty. The\u00a0conscious production of video in this context undermines its truth claims, and once video becomes the same space of lies and as film, the franchise is left in a truly difficult medial position. What kind of medium would be appropriate for a followup? What would carry the same claim to authenticity?<\/p>\n

Hence a long pass of silence from the BWP<\/em> franchise.<\/p>\n

The success of the first film and the failure of the second also points to something I’d hadn’t pondered\u00a0much. The wave of found footage films in horror seems not\u00a0a result of BWP <\/em>at all\u00a0but rather of successful scripted found footage films\u00a0(e.g.,\u00a0Cloverfield)<\/em>. The formula only takes off once its controllable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been prepping a course on horror films over the summer. While reading through materials on The Blair Witch Project, I decided it was time to rewatch Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. I saw…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18,19],"tags":[20,21,24,22,23],"class_list":["post-259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-horror","tag-berlinger","tag-blair-witch","tag-book-of-shadows","tag-documentary","tag-horror-film"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t