3. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)
When your little horror film, which cost less than $800,000 to produce, ends up making $248m at the box office, you know that a sequel's coming. Indeed, after the runaway success of the pre-eminent found footage film
The Blair Witch Project, Artisan were eager to cash in on this success and rush out a sequel, though Haxan Films, who made the first film, wanted to wait until the buzz had died down slightly. Artisan impatiently decided to press on anyway, hiring
Paradise Lost documentarian Joe Berlinger to write and direct a sequel without the original's creators, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, who served merely as executive producers and had little creative input. This sequel,
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, was in stark contrast to the original film, only occasionally using the found footage style that defined the first film and would go on to typify an entire subgenre of films. Book of Shadows, rather, budgeted at $15m - that's roughly 20x the original film's cost - better represents a big studio feature rather than the fierce indie that the original did, and as a result is rather dull and obvious with its attempts to thrill. Director Berlinger himself expressed disappointment with the final product, citing studio interference as stripping away the ambiguity and turning it into a run-of-the-mill horror film. Critics and audiences agreed; the film received a 13% Rotten Tomatoes score, and it was nominated for 5 Razzie awards, including Worst Picture, while only managing to gross $47m at the box office. Surely an optimistic testament that audiences
do favour originality over indiscriminately high budgets, it remains a forgettable sequel to a film that changed the horror landscape forever, and killed any prospect of a franchise dead in its tracks. It's a shame as this is one franchise that could have worked, had they stuck to the found footage aesthetic, but the studio attitude of "we know better" evidently killed a cash cow for everyone involved, though Myrick and Sanchez have expressed a desire to return for a third film. But after this one's mediocre performance, and the poor box office posted by Sanchez's latest film,
Lovely Molly, it's best not to expect anything.