Blair Witch

Thought last year's grunge hit "The Blair Witch Project" ended with the deaths of its three profanity-spouting, map-losing, witch-hunting rebels? It didn't. "The Blair Witch Project 2" began filming in Maryland this month, according to Andrea Thomas, manager of the Maryland Film Commission. Barbara Garner, an assistant manager at Seneca Creek State Park in Gaithersburg, said Seneca is being used as a location. Much of the first movie was shot there as well, she says. Many people assumed the wooded scenes were shot in Burkittsville, the tiny Maryland town that became associated with the film, spawned a Blair Witch souvenir market and more recently got pillaged by rowdy Blair Witch fanatics.

"Lovely Molly," the horrific tale of a woman either demonically possessed or tragically insane, may be the film that makes Eduardo Sanchez someone other than one of the guys responsible for 1999's "The Blair Witch Project. " Which would be fine with the Maryland-raised filmmaker, whose movie gets its local premiere tonight to cap the first day of the 14th Maryland Film Festival. "I love being one of the guys that did 'Blair Witch,' but I'm really proud of 'Lovely Molly,'" Sanchez, 44, said about the film he shot last fall in and around Hagerstown.

If Burkittsville doesn't want the sequel to "The Blair Witch Project," Manchester might. Manchester Town Councilwoman Mary Minderlein made the suggestion Tuesday night, near the end of a routine meeting. The Frederick County town that was the locale for last summer's surprise hit movie sent producers packing last month at the prospect of being the location for the sequel, she noted, "so the Maryland film council is looking for another town. They want to hear from Maryland towns." "I had the idea that Manchester would be a good place, maybe, to have the movie, and we should put our hat in the ring, so to speak," she said.

A 250-year-old farmhouse, stuck at the end of a long, rutted driveway, with creaking doors, splintered stairs, snakeskins in the basement and a mysterious gaping hole hidden beneath one of the outbuildings. Sounds like the perfect setting for a horror film, right? That's what the makers of "The Possession" thought, too, when they first saw the Hagerstown home that location scouts found for their 20-day film shoot, wrapping this weekend in Western Maryland. And they were right. "This house had its own creepy kind of things that it brought along," says director Eduardo Sanchez, a Marylander who shot to fame as the first-time writer-director of 1999's "The Blair Witch Project," which brought in more than $140 million at the U.S. box office.

"The Blair Witch Project" is doing more than giving audiences the creeps. It's also heralding a whole new approach to marketing the movies -- over the Internet."We really did no TV advertising until this week," says Daniel Myrick, co-director of the film that's positioning itself to be one of the most successful independent films ever. "Ninety percent of the good word of mouth that's been generated about the film has been generated through the Web."Not that marketing movies over the Internet is something new; film studios have been creating Web sites for their new releases for years; Warner Bros.

A star is born and a house is saved. The house made famous by the hit horror movie "The Blair Witch Project" will not be torn down, the state Department of Natural Resources has decided. "The state was approached by a party that has an interest in the structure that has a benefit for the state," said DNR spokesman John Surrick. The Griggs House, a two-story, gabled dwelling where the film's characters meet their end, had been slated for demolition by state officials, who concluded several years ago that the dilapidated house was a hazard.

BURKITTSVILLE - Witch-seeking fanatics swooped into town carrying video cameras, tromping through residents' yards, even stealing souvenir dirt from the cemetery to auction it off on the Internet. That was the craze created by the movie "The Blair Witch Project" when it opened last summer. Don't blame residents for not leaping in ecstasy tonight - when the sequel opens. "We wish it would just go away," said Debby Burgoyne, who at first invited tourists to use her bathroom last year, because there are no public facilities in town.

BURKITTSVILLE -- The folks in this farm country hamlet south of Frederick have had as much as they can take of the attention generated by the film "Blair Witch Project." The last thing they want is to see things stirred up again by a sequel. Accordingly, they sent the producers of "Blair Witch Project 2" packing from a town meeting Monday, hurling insults after them. Yesterday, only a few residents of this town of 200 at the base of South Mountain would discuss the fracas, and most who did talk wouldn't give their names.

It's official: There will be a "Blair Witch Project 2." In fact, there will be a "Blair Witch Project 3." Artisan Entertainment and Haxan Films announced this week that the sequel to the blockbuster independent hit "The Blair Witch Project" will start filming by March, for release next fall. Award-winning documentarian Joe Berlinger ("Brother's Keeper," "Paradise Lost") will direct the film in his feature debut. Artisan and Berlinger are keeping mum about the sequel's storyline, but the movie is likely to be shot in rural Maryland, as was the first movie.

If this is in regards to `The Blair Witch Project,' ah, it is fiction. However, we welcome you to our community. You'll see we have rich farm lands, mountains and a quaint village. So, we are looking forward to meeting you.-- Burkittsville town council's recorded phone message.BURKITTSVILLE -- It's been a ghost town here lately. "Beware this House is Haunted" is the scariest sight, and that's just an early Halloween decoration on one of the Victorian homes on Main Street.The really spooky occurrences -- tourists from Buffalo or Cleveland showing up to buy 21-cent postcards devilishly postmarked "Burkittsville" -- are gone.

A low-budget independent film from one of the writer-directors of "The Blair Witch Project" will be shooting in Western Maryland next month, the state Department of Business and Economic Development announced Wednesday. "The Possession" will shoot for about four weeks in Hagerstown and other Washington County locations, writer-director Eduardo Sanchez said. He expects the movie to employ a crew of between 15 and 25 people, and hopes to hire many of them locally. "We're trying to hire as many local people as possible," said Sanchez, who lives in Urbana, near Frederick.

The terror du jour is "Paranormal Activity," but it's following the recipe set out by the made-in-Maryland "Blair Witch Project" a decade ago. It's a haunted-house movie, not a haunted forest film like "Blair Witch." But the catch-as-catch-can style, the mood of growing dread, and the conceit that audiences are seeing footage found after the demise of the characters are straight from the "Blair Witch" game plan. No one recognizes the similarities more acutely than Montgomery County native and Frederick resident Eduardo Sanchez, who co-directed "The Blair Witch Project" (with Daniel Myrick)

Cloverfield is The Blair Witch Project for the post-Sept. 11 generation, a first-person, hand-held camera exploration of terror that's long on style and technique, short on substance and plot. Like Blair Witch, Cloverfield purports to be a found videotape. Only this time, in keeping with an America where terror has become all too real, the tape reveals not ephemeral ghosts, but flesh-and-blood invaders. Introduced as some sort of government exhibit, found in the area known as "Central Park" (their quote marks, not mine)

Meta movie moment What: MICA and Maryland Film Festival present a documentary film series. Where: The Brown Center, 1301 Mount Royal Ave. When: 7:30 p.m. Monday. Why: Because it is showing two fake documentaries -- back to back. First up is Curse of the Blair Witch, a 40-minute documentary-style film that tells the "back story" of The Blair Witch Project. Eduardo Sanchez, the Maryland-reared director of this and The Blair Witch Project, will be on hand for a Q&A. Also showing will be Forgotten Silver, a film shown on New Zealand television about a man who invented many of the filming techniques used today -- all fiction of course.

PARK CITY, Utah - JT Petty eats the same burrito for three days. "I'm pathologically frugal," the Severna Park filmmaker said at the Sundance Film Festival this week. "It impresses everybody but my girlfriend." But Petty might have outdone himself in writing and directing Soft for Digging, a horror movie that made it to Sundance on a measly $6,000 budget. The actual tally on his receipts was $5,700, but Petty said he was just being conservative. He shot the movie for his New York University film school thesis three years ago in the woods near Elkton.

Here's a movie you won't want to take grandma to see. Cannibal Holocaust, a film so grisly it was widely banned upon its 1979 release, is coming to the Charles tonight, courtesy of the Maryland Film Festival. The story of four filmmakers who vanished while making a documentary about South American cannibals holds little back. (The conceit - this is the footage they shot, found six months after they disappeared - sounds more than a little like The Blair Witch Project, doesn't it?) "This is not an imitation," the film's tagline promises.

"Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2" gets credit for avoiding the easy path. Too bad the path it chooses doesn't lead us anywhere we want to be taken. Instead, we find a confusing pastiche of gore-movie cliches and psychological mumbo-jumbo, and plot that's too clever by half. Last year's "The Blair Witch Project" was a cheapie independent film that raked in more than $200 million and turned the Frederick County hamlet of Burkittsville into an unwilling tourist attraction. Ingeniously crafted and brilliantly marketed, "Blair Witch" gave audiences a singular thrill.

Joe Berlinger knew he was in a no-win situation the moment he agreed to direct the sequel to "The Blair Witch Project." Fans of the first film's fake documentary style are going to be disappointed; "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2" is definitely a movie. Fans of the Blair Witch herself are going to be disappointed; it's debatable whether she shows up in the film at all. And fans of the first film, distressed by the very thought of doing a sequel at all, are going to be disappointed. "I know that no matter what we do with this movie," he says, "some people will not like it. It's definitely going to be my poison chalice."

LET'S BAN movie critics from reviewing historical films. That way, we'll make their lives - and ours - easier to sit through. Film criticism is a noble profession, focusing on an exciting and vibrant art form. But critics and I often are on different wavelengths. Any film universally panned by critics, I'm sure to like. Those that most critics praise, I'm sure to detest. I first became leery of critics years ago, when I went to see "Picnic at Hanging Rock" at the Charles. The plot was about three girls who mysteriously disappear on a picnic.

OK, so "Blair Witch 2" was a bust, both commercially and critically. Despite that, the local film community had a banner year in 2000. And that goes both for people watching and people making movies. Certainly the highlight of the year was April's second annual Maryland Film Festival, which dismissed any thoughts of a sophomore slump with a schedule that, if anything, highlighted an even greater variety of films than 1999's inaugural effort. With a slate that included everything from local underground filmmakers to "Lawrence of Arabia," from magic lantern shows to the legendary Kuchar Brothers, there were plenty of reasons to pitch a tent at the Charles and spend an entire weekend in front of a movie screen.