Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #559
Written 10/24/00, Revised 6/25/08
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Buy it... if you have an immense amount of expendable income and
think that you might actually be entertained by a mindless 40 minutes of
atmospheric sound effects.
Avoid it... if you prefer not to indulge in a boring, not so scary,
scrambled mess of aural unpleasantness.
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| Burwell |
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2: (Carter Burwell)
Greed versus art. Few would argue that the unconventional, low budget
1999 thriller The Blair Witch Project didn't have an artistic
element to its construct. Even fewer would argue that its sequel the
following year, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, wasn't spawned
purely from greed. There have been countless terrible sequels to horror
films in the last thirty years, but Book of Shadows: Blair Witch
2 is appropriately considered by many to be among the worst. Turning
to more of a conventional, Hollywood style of filmmaking, the sequel
lost all of the artistic sense of the first film, failing to draw on any
of its popular creativity. In fact, none of the characters from the
first film returns. Nor do the sparse technological production elements.
Among the second film's failures was Artisan Entertainment's decision to
go ahead and actually employ a traditional soundtrack in Book of
Shadows: Blair Witch 2. While composer Carter Burwell did a decent
job of at least attempting to acknowledge the effectiveness of the
minimal approach in his score for the sequel, the insertion of heavy
metal songs in the finished product didn't win any style points.
Burwell's assignment to Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was
intriguing (if not surprising) for two reasons. Obviously, with the
first film employing no score whatsoever, the hiring of a well-known
composer for the sequel was an interesting move. In retrospect, an
argument could be made that Burwell was faced with a no-win situation
because, simply put, the fact that any score would exist in the sequel
at all was a definite advance indicator that Hollywood was in the
process of screwing things up. Secondly, because Burwell had proven his
ability to create strange textures with unpredictable results, his take
on the cult concept was worth a listen. With the popularity of the first
film still in everyone's mind, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
received no less than the "two album treatment," with a Burwell-only
score release hitting store shelves a week after the obligatory song
compilation that only contributed to the demise of the film.
Burwell tried hard to be unconventional for the
occasion, traveling to the woods to record the sounds of rocks banging
and water flowing, among other effects. He used these samples, along
with similarly vague sounds, to produce rhythms that barely register
throughout much of the score. It's a uniquely low-budget solution that
must have seemed like a good idea at the time. The atmospheric score was
performed by Burwell and two others named "gman" and "SPLaTTeRCell."
There were probably executives at Artisan who wished they had used dumb
pseudonyms, too. The score starts very promisingly, with the sounds of
individual drops in a puddle building in layers until they reach a
frenetic clutter of sound effects. Forty minutes later, however, that
clutter still hadn't formed into anything synchronous (or even remotely
harmonious in a sense of chord progressions), and, in an inversion of
how it began, it simply faded to an unceremonious end. More than in any
other score in recent memory,
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
accomplishes absolutely nothing. It's doesn't even establish a mood or
produce a distinct emotional response. A bizarre experiment of
standardized samples, synth loops, electric guitars, and odd synthesized
noises mechanically march through their clangs, clunks, whoops, and
bangs without so much as raising a single hair in fright. And that's the
most disappointing part of it all; there's nothing scary about this
music. Not even remotely so. Burwell himself had described the score
using phrases like "the sounds of the forest, a magical, potentially
evil place," "forest sounds build their emotional effect by clinging
relentlessly," "unrecognizable sounds blossoming darkly..." And yet,
what you hear is a collection of electronic samples that merge the
totally lame tone of Evan H. Chen's
Babylon 5: Crusade with the
worst traits of James Horner's
Vibes. Parts of it could even
confuse you into thinking that the Blair Witch existed in the Congo
rather than Maryland. Burwell succeeded in creating an unpleasant score,
but unfortunately not in the way that he had intended. It's not
unsettling. It's not frightening. It's not really interesting. And it's
certainly not worth buying.
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Bias Check:
For Carter Burwell reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.84
(in 19 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.82
(in 11,704 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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