The movie sequel nobody liked except Stephen King: “I was pretty much alone on that one”
Lightning in a bottle is a difficult thing to capture once, which is why Hollywood has become so susceptible to the law of diminishing returns. Some movies should never be given sequels, and one of the prime examples found itself with an unlikely supporter in Stephen King.
While there are a handful of titles that will forever remain immune from sequels, remakes, reboots, reinventions, and re-imaginings, that list grows shorter by the year. There isn’t much that can truly be considered sacred anymore, and King knows a thing or two about being repeatedly cannibalised.
Many of his novels, novellas, and short stories have been brought to the screen at least twice, and he probably doesn’t mind, since he’ll get paid every time. However, it is surprising to know that he “loved” the follow-up to a cultural phenomenon that scared him shitless, mostly because nobody else did.
It’s the sort of thing that’ll never work again in the online era, and those who weren’t around at the time probably won’t understand just how big a deal The Blair Witch Project was. Yes, it ushered in the age of viral marketing, but never again will audiences be hoodwinked into believing what they’re seeing on the big screen is actually real.
Piquing the world’s interest, the found footage pioneer became the most profitable release in cinema history, and it made a huge impact on King, if not an especially positive one. He called it “the only time in my life when I quit a horror movie in the middle because I was too scared to go on,” and praise doesn’t come much higher when he’s one of the genre’s defining voices.
There was no chance that the magic would work twice, but because the film made so much money, a sequel was rushed into production anyway. 15 months after the original had changed low-budget filmmaking forever, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was released, and it was just awful.
A combination of standard horror flick and semi-meta commentary on The Blair Witch Project, Book of Shadows saw its characters head into the woods where the first one was filmed, where supernatural shenanigans inevitably unfold. Nobody wanted it, nobody needed it, and a Razzie win for ‘Worst Remake or Sequel’ was the least it deserved.
However, in the foreword to the revised 2010 edition of his book, Danse Macabre, King became its solitary flag-bearer. “What works one time (that final hand-from-the-grave scare scene in Carrie, for instance) often won’t work again… at least until it does,” he wrote. “What worked in a super-low-budget flick like Blair Witch may not work on a higher budget (the sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, for instance; I loved it, but I was pretty much alone on that one.”
While there have been some modern reappraisals that try to repaint the picture as a worthy successor to its game-changing predecessor, Book of Shadows is still terrible. Even the worst movies have at least one fan, though, and in this case, it’s Stephen King, of all people.
