Both Sequels to an Iconic 1990s Horror Film Just Hit HBO Max (And One Is Way Better Than We Gave It Credit For)

While the 1990s were a great decade for movies overall, they were particularly great for independent film. The decade not only saw many independent filmmakers like Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson have their big breakthroughs, but also saw many indie films have major commercial success. A few of these films went on to have serious cultural significance, including The Blair Witch Project. The film, made on a budget of well under a million dollars, became a box office juggernaut making more than $248 million and captured pop culture fascination with it’s found footage pseudo-documentary style in a chilling tale of three students who hike into the Maryland woods to film a documentary about a local myth.

Given the massive success of The Blair Witch Project, the movie got a quick sequel with 2000’s Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 that was poorly received and didn’t perform particularly well at the box office and would get another, more direct sequel nearly 20 years later, Blair Witch. Now, both of those sequels are available to stream on HBO Max this month — and looking back, we might have been wrong about Book of Shadows after all.

Read Next

Horror Reboot of Classic Disney Franchise Confirms Unofficial Scream Crossover Is Happening

Blair Witch is A Proper Successor to The Original, But Book of Shadows is Actually Better

When Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was released in 2000, to say that it went over poorly in comparison to The Blair Witch Project would be a little bit of an understatement. Critics panned the movie and audiences disliked it as well. The biggest complaint was that the movie seemingly had nothing to do with the original film. Unlike The Blair Witch Project, Book of Shadows as a more traditional horror film, presented with a traditional narrative format and not the found footage format that had been a major component of the first film. Many decried the film as the worst sequel ever made.

However, looking back, it seems like we all may have missed the point of the movie. Book of Shadows is about a group of people so obsessed with the mythology of The Blair Witch Project after it goes what we would now call “viral” that they descend on the town where it was filmed, hoping to experience things for themselves. This goes terribly awry, as you might guess. While some aspects of the movie and it’s various horror elements are a bit cheesy and overdone, there is a larger bit of commentary at play. The film functions as something of a look at obsession and mass hysteria. When you watch it with that in mind, it becomes an entirely different film and if you go one step further to think about how much The Blair Witch Project captured attention when it was released, it really makes for interesting commentary — and thus a very fitting sequel.

In that regard, it actually works better than the more direct sequel, 2016’s Blair Witch. That film follows James Donahue, the brother of Heather Donahue who disappeared while investigating the legend of the Blair Witch in the first film. When he finds a video on YouTube that has an image of a woman he believes to be her, he goes into the woods with his friends and the people who uploaded the video and say they can lead them to the original tapes if the come along. While the film more closely aligns with the original film, it is in many ways something of an updated rehash of the original concept. It fundamentally stands as an interesting concept and is a decent movie but doesn’t offer anything new the way Book of Shadows does.

Of course, with both Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 and Blair Witch both streaming on HBO Max, you can decide for yourself which sequel is the better one — and which one scares you the most.

What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!