Let’s get one hing straight: “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2” is not trying to be “The Blair Witch Project.”
And what better way to get that point across than a vastly different Web marketing campaign.
Artisan Entertainment, the studio behind the “Blair Witch” franchise, has announced plans to launch a three-day online Webfest on the sequel’s official site (www.blairwitch.com) starting Oct. 18.
Set up as a kind of a “Blair Witch 2” convention and then some, the around-the-clock Webfest will include live chats (among them with the sequel’s director, Joe Berlinger, who helmed the documentary “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills”), live musical performances, auctions of the film’s props through amazon.com, sneak peek footages of the film and 64 hours of original streamed programming.
And while the original 1999 “Blair Witch Project” uses the Web (in particular, its official site) to insinuate itself into the filmgoers’ minds by toying with the boundary between reality and fiction, the sequel (opens Oct. 20), to put it simply, is not even going to try to go there.
“Our goal is not to reinvent the first one [Web site],” a spokesman from Artisan told Inside.com. ”We can’t match that kind of traffic. Our goal is to create a community for science fiction and horror fans. This will be a more straightforward campaign.”
By design, it would be somewhat ludicrous for the sequel and its marketing campaign to be anything like the original. After all, the cat’s out of the bag: “The Blair Project” — as much as it made itself out to be — was not real, and the so-called filmmakers in the film were merely actors.
Still, even though the studio is scrapping the old concept, they’re not letting go of the Web as an integral part of the sequel’s marketing.
“I think they [Artisan] are definitely trying to tab into the Web once again. Since for the first movie, the promotion is basically the Web site. When people think of the ‘Blair Witch,’ they think of the Web site. Artisan is trying to do the same thing with the sequel, but by doing it bigger and better,” Dustin Shelby, creator of the Blair Witch Fan Club site (www.blairwitchfanclub.com), told Hollywood.com.
The 17-year-old Atlanta native has hosted the fan site since May 1999, a couple of months before the original “Blair Witch” opened. Like so many others, he got hooked on the phenomenon through the film’s Web site.
“The Webfest is probably going to get a lot of people interested in the sequel,” Shelby predicted.
“But with the other promotional things that they’re doing, like the ‘Blair Witch’ dolls and stuff like that. Well, that’s kind of cheesy.”
