10 Horror Movies That Pissed Off Audiences Straight Away
9. It's Not Found Footage - Blair Witch 2: Book Of Shadows
On one hand, you can give the second Blair Witch movie a mild sliver of credit for not just lazily recycling the formula of its phenomenally successful predecessor, but this is also a rare case where that probably would've been the better option.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, helmed by veteran documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger, ditches the found footage format of the first film and instead unfolds as a more conventional narrative feature.
The movie's opening is pretty much a series of deflating revelations that steadily arrive one after another.
For starters, the sequel takes place in a world where The Blair Witch Project movie exists, lending it a half-baked meta-narrative element that feels wildly at odds with the tone of the first film.
In addition to this, the absence of found footage, overabundance of nu-metal music, and generally flashy, quick-cutting editing style all seems totally divorced from the original movie.
Throw in an obnoxious host of new characters, plenty of awful dialogue, and you've got a disappointment stew cooking.
This isn't to say that sequels can't deviate radically from their predecessors to great success, but the first 10 minutes made it painfully clear that all this wasn't the course to go.
A more straight-forward, pared-down found footage follow-up with a slightly bigger budget and some creative scares would've probably been infinitely more successful than this.
Director Berlinger wasn't happy with the outcome either, though: he claims that the studio chopped up his footage and insisted upon the inclusion of "hip" metal music. Either way, not good.