Trouble Brewing Over a Sequel

Joe Berlinger is a month away from the release of his first dramatic feature film, but he’s not gearing up for the usual round of film festival screenings and promotional hustles. Instead, he’s bracing for an onslaught of criticism.

“It seems like everyone is predisposed to hate this movie,” says the 37-year-old director. “No matter what this ends up being, it seems like a good portion of the population is ready to complain about it.”

Such is the dilemma when your first big movie happens to be the sequel to one of the most hyped and profitable horror hits in movie history. “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,” which opens Oct. 27, has already ignited a furious debate among movie buffs, who have unloaded on Internet bulletin boards with a torrent of snap judgments, furious rants and cries of sellout. Meanwhile, a teaser trailer released in theaters in June was reportedly greeted with scattered boos and popcorn pitched at screens.

Never mind that no one has actually seen the movie. “There’s a huge backlash brewing,” he concedes. “It’s like coming out with ‘Rocky Horror 2.’ Following up on a cultural phenomenon is a very tricky business.”

Some of that sourness is simply spillover from the original, the jittery little stunt of a picture that became a pop culture event, grossing $250 million worldwide, landing the creators and stars on the covers of Time and Newsweek, and inspiring a wave of lampoons and Digital-Beta imitators. While fans praised “The Blair Witch Project” for its originality, refreshing lack of gore and visceral depiction of fear, many moviegoers emerged feeling baffled, queasy or just plain ripped-off.

“I hear ‘Blair Witch’ was made with $30,000,” Chris Rock joked at the MTV Movie Awards. “Someone’s walking around with $29,000 in his pocket.”

Even as they reveled in the receipts from the original, executives at Artisan Entertainment took those complaints to heart. When directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick bowed out of the sequel--the two are credited as executive producers on “Book of Shadows” while they work on a comedy titled “Heart of Love”--Artisan executives pondered several scenarios for the follow-up, most employing the same low-tech, shaky-cam trickery that made “Blair Witch” so startling.

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But in a choice typical of the inside-out logic that has guided the sequel, Artisan elected to be original by being conventional.

“Book of Shadows” is in most ways a typical horror movie, shot on 35-millimeter film with a budget of $10 million, a few product placements and generous helpings of digital effects and on-screen violence. None of the original cast members is back, but the story revolves around the same intricate mythology created by “Blair Witch.”

“We wanted this one to deliver in a different way,” says Amorette Jones, executive vice president of worldwide marketing at Artisan. “The first movie didn’t deliver the blood and big payoff scenes that people expect. We wanted this one to cater to those commercial tastes while staying true to the spirit of the first one.”

Taking another risk, Artisan turned over the controls of its money train to Berlinger, a documentary filmmaker with one independent film (“Brother’s Keeper”) and two HBO specials (“Paradise Lost” and “Revelations: Paradise Lost 2”) to his credit. Berlinger was tapped to write and direct the sequel after pitching studio executives his own screenplay, a horror movie titled “The Little Fellow in the Attic,” about a socialite killed by a man who has secretly lived in his house for 17 years.

“I came in to pitch this movie at precisely the right moment,” he says. “But after meeting with me a few times, it became clear that I was being interviewed for something else entirely,” he says.

While the choice of Berlinger is undoubtedly a gamble, it does follow the logic that Artisan hopes will help generate buzz around the sequel. The original “Blair Witch” was a faux documentary made by aspiring feature filmmakers. It’s somehow fitting therefore that the follow-up feature is being made by a documentary filmmaker, one not unlike the young ghoul-chasers who were the focus of the first film.

No one was more surprised by the choice than Berlinger. “I always imagined my first feature would be a little Sundance movie,” he says. “I expected to make the kind of movie that opens on five or six screens and hopefully shows people I can be trusted with a bigger budget. So it’s sort of bizarre that I’m doing a movie that not only has the burden of being the follow-up to one of the biggest cultural phenomenons of the last decade, but is also opening on 4,000 screens in six countries. It’s a little intimidating, to say the least.”

The idea was initially so off-putting that after reading three proposed scripts, Berlinger was ready to walk away. “I didn’t want to offend anyone, but I felt all these scripts were big mistakes,” he says. “They were all well-written and well-realized, but they were all basically the same movie all over again. It was just more shaky cameras, more found footage and more people going into the woods and bad things happening.”

Berlinger won out with a different approach altogether, working with co-writer Dick Beebe on a story that attempts to cast a critical eye on the hoopla surrounding the first movie. “There’s no way lightning is going to strike twice,” he says. “If I went into the woods and shook the camera around and did the same story, that would be completely boring. I tried to do everything against what people are anticipating.”

Before starting work, Berlinger traveled to the township of Burkittsville, Md., to interview hard-core “Blair Witch” fans who trampled through nearby woods and cemeteries searching for clues that the movie myth was somehow true. This research provided the basis for the sequel, which follows five fictionalized fans, one of whom is working on a book. This group of people falls unconscious after setting up camp with video cameras at the site of the abandoned cottage where the first movie ends, then retreats to a warehouse to examine tapes that might reveal what happened.

“What fascinated me about ‘Blair Witch’ was not really the movie itself, but the incredible media attention it received, which caused people to go overrun this town and just not accept that what they saw was a movie,” says Berlinger. “As clever as ‘Blair Witch’ was, I’m shocked that so many people took it to the next level. I was more fascinated by that than anything in the movie.”

The sequel offered Berlinger a chance, he says, to shake audiences’ faith in the medium that was the foundation of “Blair Witch.” “It amazes me that the cliches of bad documentary making have become the shorthand of reality,” he says. “The big question is, if something is shot on video, should we just accept its reality? Depending on your attitude toward video, you can look at what happens in this movie in two very different ways.”

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Berlinger says the deeper meaning of the story will probably be lost on the moviegoing masses that Artisan is hoping to rope in for the sequel. “I hope this doesn’t disappoint people, but I don’t consider this a horror movie at all,” he says. “A lot of creepy stuff happens and it has a very shocking ending, but it’s not a jump-out-of-your-seat scary movie. It’s very ambiguous.”

A little too ambiguous for studio executives, who sent Berlinger back to his Manhattan editing room with a litany of notes that added up to one thing: Goose it up for the masses. “They want a commercial movie, and I’m not a commercial filmmaker so there’s going to be some inevitable clashes of opinion,” he says. “Left to my own devices, I would have made a much longer, more layered movie. But I know I have a responsibility to deliver a commercial movie. What will end up on the screen is probably 85% of what I would have done on my own--but what I would have done might have failed at the box office.”

And the box-office pressures for this particular movie are enormous, he says. Ordinarily a studio would be satisfied if a $10-million movie like “Book of Shadows” went on to bring in $40 million or $50 million. But this has the potential to be a major franchise for Artisan, much as the “Nightmare on Elm Street” films helped New Line Cinema establish itself. “If this doesn’t do $80 [million] or $90 million, it’s going to be considered a failure,” he says. “I’m under this huge microscope.”

A few weeks ago, Berlinger says, he decided to check the early chatter on Aint-It-Cool-News.com, the Web site operated by Harry Knowles that helped propel “Blair Witch” out of the art houses. While Knowles himself had high hopes, his rabid following was quick to whip out the big guns. “Don’t support this pathetic attempt to line people’s pockets,” went one typical posting, from an irate fan called Lazarus Long. Another simply stated: “ ‘Blair Witch 2’ is the most idiotic sequel I have ever heard about.”

Berlinger hopes he can bring those fans around. “I know this movie has a very unique voice,” he says. “Whether it works commercially, we’ll have to wait and see. It could be back to documentaries for me very quickly.”