Like Scream, Book of Shadows is interested in exploring how fandom quickly becomes fanaticism, as the characters get so committed to their own beliefs in the Blair Witch or the paranormal, that it obscures how they interpret reality. The tour group consists of stereotypes of people who obsessed over the horror film, from the self-proclaimed Wiccan who hates how the film portrayed witches, to the goth kid who thinks it’s fun to go to cursed film locations, to the true-crime aficionados that are there to find out the “real story” behind the Blair Witch. If the opening sequence full of news reports about obsessed fans flooding the town of Burkittsville, Maryland, wasn’t enough to clue audiences in, the choice of characters in Book of Shadows pokes fun directly at the rabid fans of The Blair Witch Project. ![]() ![]() Subscribe to Observer’s Keeping Watch Newsletter While on the tour, the group goes wild with drugs and alcohol in the middle of woods they believe to be haunted, blacking out and awakening to all their equipment and research completely destroyed-prompting the Scooby-Doo equivalent of the plot of The Hangover. The film follows a group of strangers signing up for a Blair Witch tour guided by Jeff, a self-proclaimed expert on everything related to the film and who takes advantage of fans by selling tons of merchandise (like the executives who greenlit the film itself). ![]() Instead of following a new group of film students looking for Heather Donahue like 2016’s direct sequel Blair Witch did, director Joe Berlinger takes a step back and uses Book of Shadows to directly dissect the original Blair Witch and its impact on pop culture.
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