8 Horror Movies Ruined By Last Minute Changes

It may be the ramblings of a man just trying to make up for his own inadequacies, or it might be the absolute truth that the last minute alterations to Book of Shadows left it in the absolute state it is. That all depends on how much you trust Joe Berlinger.

Berlinger took on the project with the intention of directing the Blair Witch mythos away from the supernatural and more into human evil. Already some people may be rolling their eyes, stating he missed the point, but in the end this isn’t what killed the movie.

The new approach wasn’t a bad idea in itself, and had the potential to be interesting. Berlinger wanted to make the whole thing somewhat of a meditation on mass hysteria, just like the kind that arose after the original film was released and a bunch of media-illiterate idiots thought it was a real documentary.

Unfortunately for him, this isn’t what the backers had in mind. It doesn’t scream ‘sexy hollywood banger’, and so in post-production they took his contemplative baby and butchered it. They made it into a commercial piece, complete with cringey special effects and shoehorned-in on-screen violence. The footage of the protagonists murdering tourists we glimpse in flashes was literally shot a couple of weeks before the film’s release, right in Berlinger’s back garden.

In the end, it was studio-meddling that ruined it all. And nobody is surprised.