Which Witch is Which?



Keeping it real: Documentarian-turned-scaremeister Joe Berlinger

The director of the Blair Witch sequel on the difference between reality and fiction.

by Sam Adams

"I’m not going to win everybody over," Joe Berlinger admits. "I’m sure as many people will hate this movie as will like it."

The movie he’s talking about is Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, and it’s a pretty accurate assessment of the minefield into which the director, best known for the documentaries Brother’s Keeper and Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, has stepped. It’s doubtful anyone needs a refresher course on the $30,000 indie that went on to gross $140 million last summer, or the Internet-based marketing phenomenon that helped push it to that total, or the scores of parodies and inevitable backlash it generated.

Berlinger’s own impression of The Blair Witch Project was decidedly mixed. "I consider myself [both] a storyteller and a journalist," he explains by phone from an L.A. hotel. "The storyteller in me adored the movie. I love the found footage conceit, that you’re basically watching a snuff film. [But] as a documentary-maker, I was troubled by the movie, especially the marketing. Selling a movie as real over the Internet is just one more chapter in our decade-long progression to the blurring of the line between entertainment and news, between fiction and reality."

It was that discomfort that led to the concept behind Book of Shadows, whose script Berlinger co-wrote after rejecting several "problematic" attempts at sequels by other writers. Rather than simply following the original’s story, Berlinger came up with the idea of making "a sequel to the phenomenon." Book of Shadows follows a group of obsessed Blair Witch Project fans who’ve come to Burkittsville, MD to scope out sites from the original film. After a night in the Blair Woods, their fascination takes a frightening turn when they are accused of a series of brutal murders that occurred during a three-hour period for which their memories are completely blank. The only clue to their activities is the tapes from video cameras set up to capture "Blair Witch activity." Though they initially show nothing helpful, Jeff (Jeffrey Donovan), the Internet entrepreneur whose "Blair Witch Hunt" has brought them together, assures the group that the tapes will eventually answer all questions. "Film lies," he reassures them, "but video tells the truth."

Berlinger, of course, knows better than to put his trust in recorded media. As demonstrated by his documentaries Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (co-directed with Bruce Sinofsky) and Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, he’s devoted years of his life to fighting the conviction of three West Memphis, AK teens who were convicted of a series of brutal murders based mainly on the taped "confession" of a near-retarded boy who was interrogated for almost 12 hours before the tape was turned on. (The boy later said he was told he could "go home" if he told the police what they wanted to hear.) And Berlinger knows from Internet phenomena as well: Much of Revelations focuses on the "Free the West Memphis Three" movement which has blossomed, mainly via their website at www.wm3.org, since the first film’s release. (Free the West Memphis Three, a CD to benefit the Three’s defense, is now out on Aces and Eights Records.)

"It was definitely on my mind," Berlinger says of the connection between his feature debut and his documentaries. "The idea that one film impacts another, the idea that media shapes our perceptions."

In fact, the connections between the films are numerous. Book of Shadows features a Goth character (Kim Director) who talks about being persecuted for the way she dresses, and a Wiccan (Erica Leerhsen) who derides the prejudice that she’s involved in Satanic magic; Paradise Lost’s Damien Echols, who’s now on Death Row for his role as the alleged "ringleader" of the West Memphis Three, was singled out as a suspect because he wore black, listened to heavy metal, and perused books on witchcraft from the local library. In fact, there’s no Book of Shadows in Book of Shadows, but there is one in Paradise Lost: It’s a key piece of prosecution evidence found in Echols’ trailer, used to support the contention that he was involved in black magic and engineered the murder of three boys as a Satanic ritual. Book of Shadows even cops Paradise Lost’s credit sequence, with a helicopter shot of forest scored to heavy metal music (Marilyn Manson in one case, Metallica in the other).

Evidently aware of the issues involved in tying a real-life murder case to a horror entertainment, Berlinger cautions against equating Book of Shadows too closely with Paradise Lost. But he admits the references were deliberate. Calling the movie a "satirical parable" on the eroding line between fiction and reality, Berlinger elaborates, "One of the ways I chose to be satirical is to refer to other documentaries, including my own. The fact that the kids [in Book of Shadows] might be killers does not comment on my feelings about [the West Memphis Three case]. In my opinion, Damien is completely innocent. But the fact is, I spent seven and a half years with [the Paradise Lost] story because I’m attracted to certain ideas. I’ve got a witch talking about the positive aspects of witchcraft because I learned a lot about witchcraft making a movie in which the person was accused of terrible murders [when] the worst thing he did was have a book of shadows in his trailer. That can’t help but shape my perceptions."

Instead of a fake documentary, which might well have been what the Artisan executives who signed Berlinger to direct Book of Shadows were expecting, the film bills itself as "a fictional recreation of real events," which ties neatly into Berlinger’s themes.

"As a documentary maker," he explains, "I think it’s dishonest to tell people something is real when it isn’t. I actually think this movie, and the approach I took, is more true to my documentary roots than had I gone the fake documentary route. I chose to make a movie about the real-life phenomenon, as opposed to directly continuing the story. The real-life phenomenon is a cultural touchstone that anyone in America who’s media-conscious knows about. It’s a real event. So as a documentarian doing the sequel, I chose to make a movie that’s grounded in a real event, as a comment on it."

Above all, he stresses, it’s a cautionary tale. "Because fiction filmmakers have wallowed in the clichés of bad documentary filmmaking, the more amateur the video, it’s become cultural shorthand for what’s ‘real,’ and that really bothers me. The blurring of the line between fiction and reality has become so extreme in our society, the danger is one day we’ll not be able to know the difference, and dangerous consequences will result."