Blair Witch 2 director reveals how the studio destroyed a clever sequel

Because the critiques of the 2000 sequel Guide of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 rolled in, director Joe Berlinger, days earlier than his fortieth birthday, curled up in a ball in his mattress, questioning if his profession was over.

“Every part — and I imply all the things — that made The Blair Witch Challenge a little bit indie masterpiece has been falsified and trashed on this spectacularly dangerous sequel,” Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian. “For all its intelligent notions, Guide of Shadows typically appears extra like a montage of pasted-together photos than a coherent horror story,” Steven Holden stated in The New York Occasions, whereas providing faint reward of the film’s reasonable scariness. Jonathan Rosenbaum famous in The Chicago Reader that “actuality, characters, and concern are all effectively past the capacities of this characteristic.” And Roger Ebert, who lauded Berlinger’s work on movies like Brother’s Keeper and Paradise Misplaced: The Little one Murders at Robin Hood Hills, took a shot on the filmmaker’s very being: “He is likely one of the finest documentarians round. However now that I’ve seen Guide of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, I’m disturbed.”

The reviled horror sequel did not finish Berlinger’s profession. In actual fact, the director cites its colossal failure as the explanation he tracked down Lars Ulrich, pitched him a movie on Metallica, and made one of many all-time nice music documentaries, Some Type of Monster. To climb out of a pit of despair, he chased a dream mission. However to this present day, the mere point out of Blair Witch 2 stings Berlinger. He’s not often mentioned Guide of Shadows through the years, and on a current name with Polygon, stated he couldn’t bear in mind the final time he truly watched the film.

And but. On Oct. 30, Berlinger will maintain court docket on the Nitehawk Cinema Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, for a bunch of patrons prepared to provide the film a second shot. Like so most of the oddities bursting out of Hollywood’s 2000s churn, Guide of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 has been reclaimed by the horror group as “truly good” — or not less than impressed. Berlinger says he agreed to the screening, regardless of the movie’s potential for triggering painful reminiscences, as a result of he will get what the pro-Guide of Shadows contingent sees in it.

“I don’t hate the film,” he says. “I hated the expertise of what occurred.”

Photograph: Artisan Leisure/Everett Assortment

The unique Blair Witch Challenge forged a spell over the 1999 Sundance Movie Competition. Was it reality or fiction? There was an apparent reply, however the executives at Artisan Leisure noticed potential within the confusion. The studio purchased the rights to the film out of the pageant, and in preparation for a launch in July, orchestrated a Net 1.0 advertising and marketing marketing campaign that preyed on an viewers that hadn’t but developed a style for found-footage horror. The rumors surrounding the misplaced videotapes of “Heather,” “Michael,” “Joshua,” and their seemingly supernatural demise turned Blair Witch into a world phenomenon that earned greater than $240 million worldwide off a price range within the low six figures. What critics noticed as a one-of-a-kind experiment, Artisan noticed as a gold mine. By November 1999, simply 4 months after launch, the studio had commissioned no fewer than three screenplays for a sequel.

On the similar time, Berlinger was out pitching a script he hoped can be his leap from documentary to narrative movie. His 1992 doc Brother’s Keeper interrogated media protection of a homicide in upstate New York; Paradise Misplaced probed the lives of the “West Memphis Three,” three youngsters Berlinger believed have been wrongfully convicted of homicide. (He went on to make two sequels to that movie, and performed a significant half in a court docket’s resolution to overturn the ruling and launch the lads from jail.) Berlinger hoped his narrative directorial debut can be The Little Fellow within the Attic, a true-crime-esque story of a girl who carries on a doomed affair with a person hidden in her basement. Artisan was , however as Berlinger talked to increasingly executives about making the movie, it turned obvious the corporate had ulterior motives.

“I’m about to do the pitch for the fifth time with the three co-presidents of Artisan, Amir Malin, Invoice Block, and John Hegeman. And I begin, they usually put up their hand they usually stated, ‘No, no, you’re not right here for that. We predict you’ll be an attention-grabbing selection for the sequel to The Blair Witch Challenge.’ The subterfuge of getting me there and never being sincere with me about why I’m having all these conferences ought to have been a clue [about how things would go].”

The Blair Witch Challenge was efficiently handed off as a documentary, so a documentarian directing a sequel made good sense to the studio executives who wanted a Blair Witch 2 as shortly as potential. Berlinger spent Thanksgiving 1999 studying by means of the three present scripts, and he thought they have been abysmal. All three introduced Heather, Michael, and Joshua again, by means of the identical found-footage type as the primary film.

“I referred to as them up on Monday and I stated, ‘Look, I’m passing, as a result of all three drafts to me make a mistake,’” Berlinger says. “As a documentarian, I don’t need to take part in making faux documentaries. And secondly, Heather, Josh, and Mike have been on Letterman and Leno and on the quilt of Time and Newsweek. How are you going to proceed the found-footage conceit? Years later, I noticed that’s all of the followers actually needed, and I used to be being manner overly mental about it.”

Picture: Everett Assortment

Artisan listened, and requested Berlinger to pitch his personal tackle the film. His manner in: As a substitute of a straight sequel to The Blair Witch Challenge, he would piggyback off the real-life mania induced by the movie. Within the months after Blair Witch’s launch, Burkittsville, Maryland — the real-life city the place Heather, Michael, and Joshua went lacking within the movie — was overrun with vacationers hoping for their very own Blair Witch encounter, and retailer house owners cashing in with merch. Berlinger discovered that dynamic ripe for lampooning. In his movie, a bunch of rabid followers would descend on Burkittsville to find out whether or not the Blair Witch actually exists, solely to turn out to be so misplaced within the blur between actuality and fiction that they commit homicide. There wouldn’t be a Blair Witch or something supernatural, simply grisly terror introduced on by a media circus.

Artisan purchased the pitch, then gave Berlinger two months to put in writing a script. Blair Witch 2 was going into manufacturing in January 2000, it doesn’t matter what.

Berlinger can’t say if the pure model of his film would have been good, however he would have most well-liked to flame out on his personal phrases. “My reduce had a really satirical tone that takes a horrifying twist on the finish, type of like a Scream,” he says. “I used to be making enjoyable of the entire concept of truly doing a sequel. It was a meditation on the risks of blurring the traces between leisure and information, between fiction and actuality in our society — by no means dreaming the place we’d land right now.”

It’s potential that Berlinger’s subversive Blair Witch 2 would have been one of many extra prescient motion pictures of the 2000s, however money and time constraints didn’t permit him to make the film he needed. Berlinger and co-writer Dick Beebe (1999’s Home on Haunted Hill) eked out a script in time for the January manufacturing deadline and assembled a promising forged, which included a then-unknown Jeffrey Donovan as a nü-metal-styled Blair Witch tour information, Kim Director as a goth bombshell, and Stephen Barker Turner and Tristine Skyler as two grad college students researching mass hysteria. Berlinger remembers the forged being on his wavelength and delivering precisely what he wanted to make Guide of Shadows’ tonal experiment work. He additionally remembers being fully left alone by studio executives all through the shoot in Baltimore.

“I actually had no studio supervision, besides they stored telling me, trying on the dailies, ‘Find it irresistible, adore it, maintain going!’” he says. The reason being apparent to him now: The executives at Artisan had their eyes on greater prizes. “They have been taking Artisan public on this IPO craze primarily based on the efficiency of Blair Witch. These guys have been simply too busy counting their cash earlier than it got here in.”

Berlinger wrapped on Guide of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 and shortly assembled a tough reduce he “thought was terrific, and [he] was actually proud of it.” As he locked image and labored with composer Carter Burwell on the ultimate rating for the movie in August 2000, just some months shy of the deliberate October premiere, it felt like his workforce was about to tug off a minor miracle. There was loads at stake. In response to Berlinger, the deliberate six-country, 3,000-screen rollout was set to be one of many greatest worldwide releases of all time at that time — and the director wasn’t the one one feeling the strain. Three months earlier than launch, a brand new advertising and marketing government at Artisan, Amorette Jones, arrived on Berlinger’s doorstep with notes. Blair Witch 2 apparently wanted extra scares and extra blood. “In order that they ordered reshoots and added issues that simply to this present day boggle my thoughts,” he says.

Picture: Artisan Leisure/Everett Assortment

The last-ditch effort to make Guide of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 a generic splatterfest are very obvious whereas watching the film. The movie’s opening is blisteringly humorous, with an unseen documentary crew interviewing Burkittsville locals in regards to the Blair Witch frenzy, and Donovan going full townie creepster. The studio made Berlinger reduce away to a scene of Donovan’s character being surveyed in a psych ward to create early unease, and it’s the one reshoot second he thinks works — already, the protagonists’ views are in query.

Nevertheless it’s downhill from there. As Donovan’s Jeff leads a bunch of Blair Witch-inspired hunters on a visit into the woods, the film violently volleys between two vibes: Berlinger’s slow-burn psychological descent, and bits straight out of the Noticed motion pictures. Sprinkled all through the film are bits of gore, extreme encounters with an unseen malignant pressure, and random flash-forwards to the police interviewing the group of 20-somethings about what occurred on the market within the woods. The flash-forwards have been particularly grating for Berlinger, whose whole plan was to comply with the fanboying children as paranoia festers into insanity and homicide. However the studio needed to rush up and get to the brutality.

“I cringe each time we go to these flashbacks,” Berlinger says. In his reduce, the police interrogation of the vacationers was a nine-minute reveal sequence on the finish of the movie. “You’re imagined to spend the entire movie confused and considering that the Blair Witch was an actual chance.”

Berlinger tried to push again on the edits, arguing “the entire level of the movie, and the entire level of the Blair Witch legacy, is that each one the violence occurs off display screen.” Throughout one dialog with government Amir Malan, the director invoked Alfred Hitchcock to elucidate why violence off display screen might be as or more practical than the depiction of literal homicide. As he remembers, Malan instructed him, “Our viewers can barely spell ‘Hitchcock.’”

“Whole disrespect for the viewers,” Berlinger says. “So I hate to this present day all these re-creation scenes of knife stabbings and no matter.”

Guide of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 hit theaters on Oct. 27, 2000, proper on schedule. As a deflated Berlinger is aware of all too effectively, the film was a crucial failure — however not a monetary one. The sequel made cash, each in theatrical launch — incomes almost $50 million on a $12 million price range — and residential video. Of the numerous concessions Berlinger in the end made throughout the making of the movie, one which benefited the field workplace, was the choice to swap moodier music for jams of the occasions. Whereas the director’s reduce opened on swooping Paradise Misplaced-esque photographs of Maryland timber set to Frank Sinatra’s “Witchcraft,” the theatrical reduce replaces the crooning with Marilyn Manson’s “Disposable Teenagers.” Godhead, P.O.D., Rob Zombie, and System of a Down all discovered their manner on the Blair Witch 2 soundtrack so Artisan may bundle a CD with the eventual DVD launch. Berlinger believes the studio made $25 million on the bundle alone.

None of this eased Berlinger’s frustration over Blair Witch 2’s launch. His identify was nonetheless on a horrible film, and only some critiques stepped again far sufficient to see how a studio gunning to capitalize on hype would possibly waylay a filmmaker trying to say one thing substantial. The reactions ate away at him for weeks after the film hit theaters, although right now, the hearth unleashed in his route not less than makes a bit extra sense.

“I feel any film referred to as Blair Witch 2 rushed out a 12 months later… Folks simply needed to hate the film,” he says. “I underestimated the quantity of venom that something referred to as Blair Witch 2 was going to have.”

Time has been sort to Guide of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, although Berlinger can’t fairly shake the curse. The film sits with a bleak 14% constructive score on Rotten Tomatoes. But when the person as soon as paralyzed by the expertise of directing the rattling factor can rethink and watch it once more, perhaps audiences will, too. He nonetheless believes, by means of all of the studio-mandated extra, the movie has one thing to say in regards to the second.

“I feel the film predicted what’s taking place now,” he says. “That blurring of the road between information and leisure, between reality and fiction, has gotten to the purpose the place our society is deeply dysfunctional. Congress is dysfunctional, for instance, as a result of lots of people who’ve been elected to Congress have been elected as a result of they’ve a really totally different model of actuality from their constituents. We’re a rustic that may’t agree on what shade the sky is. We’re in the course of this Israeli-Hamas horror present, and there’s a lot misinformation and disinformation and faux movies. That’s the period we dwell in. And that tendency, that blurring of the road between fiction and actuality, was what I used to be going for in Blair Witch [2].

“There have been loads of actually good concepts that have been forward of its time, however the studio on the twelfth hour bought scared. I feel that’s what individuals are seeing.”