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Why I liked Blair Witch 2
I'm going to state this once only because this is one of the hated movies of the year. Very few people liked it at all, critics and audiences alike. If you go to Critics.com, you'll find only two praising reviews for it, and three critics who hated it enough to give it the (in) famous zero star rating. As for audiences: it made a profit, but not much of one. Made for $15 million, it grossed just over $26 million at the box office (and people say I don't do research). Why was it so disliked? Bad direction? Joe Berlinger has made 2 of the most disturbing documentaries I have ever seen called Paradise Lost, and Paradise Lost 2: Revelations. Did he screw up somehow, or did he do something that audiences are unaccustomed to?
Blair Witch 2 plays with the idea of reality, both real and perceived. Instead of relying on gore as a shock, here it's used as an illustration of truth. Early in the movie, two characters (Tristen Skyler and Stephen Barker Turner) have a discussion based on the myth of the Blair witch. Is she really real, or is she fake. Tristen argues that her "real" reality is irrelevant because the 1999 film has struck a nerve in people. Their belief in the film's truth allows a perception of reality to exist. If people go out into the woods looking for a witch, they just might find one. Stephen counters this by saying it's not REALLY real. The perception of a witch is irrelevant because there is no witch.
The movie toys with the idea of reality and perception throughout, using the first movie as a springboard, and then delving into territory that has been seen before, but hasn't been used since the heyday of horror. It begins with the Blair witch movie as fiction. It's never stated whether it's clearly fiction, but it's stated that it's PERCEIVED as fiction. In the movie, the tapes were found in the woods. Heather, Josh, and Mike were film students who disappeared. Many people make the mistake in seeing this by saying something along the vein of what one reviewer at http://www.imdb.com said, "It mentions the original film as a work of fiction, and it is debatable if the BWP2 storyline exists in the same continuum as the first film."
This reviewer is right about one thing; it is debatable. It's debatable in that we never really know, even at the end, if there is a Blair witch or if people who, after a long night of drugs and alcohol, convinced themselves that something unworldly was going on. We see a bridge apparently out, then later it's not. A van seems to be destroyed, but later we see it's not. Berlinger uses video evidence to show that what the people THINK they saw may not be what they did see. However, this isn't the point. The first movie used the Blair Witch as a real villain. We know it was fiction. But what if we didn't? Say we flock to the woods by the hundreds, looking around and wondering if there is a witch. Going out there, convinced that something happened, a small group of people might be convinced that something did happen.
The movie depends on unstable elements; people with psychiatric problems, stress, and a general tentative grip on reality that coincides with being fed up with being singled out for differences. How often have you told someone a story that you knew to be true, only to have another witness to the same events tell the story differently? Blair Witch 2 uses this, with the main characters seeing and hearing one version, only to have it refuted. They KNOW that what they saw was the right way, and they refuse to back out of it.
In the end, I suppose the movie just struck a nerve with me. The combination of a love for the old style of horror and a general dislike for being refuted simply because someone disagrees with me has caused me to see a lot in the movie. It brings up the question of right and wrong. What is right and wrong, if not a series of perceptions? Did I leave a convenience store in a huff, or did I brutally murder the store attendant with her own nail file?