<i>Blair Witch 2:</i> It's About The Fans

Just in time for Halloween, Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is premiering. As CBS News Correspondent Teri Okita reports, if you expected a repeat of the first Blair Witch movie, you're in for a big surprise.

Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 starts innocently enough. Five strangers, obsessed with the Blair Witch movie, go to the Burkittville woods to find out what the craze is about.

But the movie quickly turns dark and the group turns on each other when, after one mysterious night, strange things start happening.

"This is about the fans rather than about some mythology-hunting group," said actor Jeffrey Donovan, who's in the sequel. "It represents the niche of that community that was obsessed with the first film."

The big question people in Hollywood and Internet junkies everywhere are asking is: "Can a sequel scare up the same box office frenzy as the original?"

No low-budget film — lacking either stars or slick sets — ever had the success that the original had. Made for $30,000, it grossed $245 million worldwide as it frightened audiences lured into theaters by an unprecedented buzz started on the Internet.

"It was a case of the right film at the right time, propelled by a new medium — the Internet," said Joe Berlinger, director of the sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.

Unlike the cleverly contrived underground buzz generated online for the original film, The Blair Witch Project, film distributor Artisan Entertainment is using an all-out marketing blitz to promote the sequel.

Artisan, partnering with Yahoo!, Amazon.com and many others, launched a 64-hour Web-fest recently, offering footage from the film, chats, panels, and appearances by stars like Linda Blair of The Exorcist fame and Gothic crooner Poe and rocker Marilyn Manson. The film opens Oct. 27, the Friday of Halloween weekend.

"All sequels have the criticism they're not as good as the original," said Marc Scarpa, chief executive of Jumpcut Inc., producer of the Webcast.

"We made a distinct decision to make the online component a completely separate experience from the film," he said.

The original online marketing of the film blurred the line between fact and fiction so that many moviegoers believed they were seeing a factual, frightening documentary about three film students who went into woods haunted by the mythical Blair Witch and met untimely ends.

By showing snippets of the grainy, documentary-style film on the Web and providing more information about the Blair Witch legend, Artisan Entertainment generated a mystery and underground buzz unprecedented for a film before its release.

Unlike the first movie, the second movie — made for $12 million — is not shot in faux-documentary style, but is more comercial with special effects and is more typical of the horror genre people are used to seeing.

"Because The Blair Witch Project was presented as a documentary, I thought it would be too much to ask audiences to once again suspend disbelief," said Berlinger.

Instead Berlinger said he sought to make a sequel about the impact the first movie had made on five characters who are obsessed with it, CBS News Correspondent Teri Okita reports.

"I hoped to create a psychological horror movie that serves a mainstream audience while simultaneously commenting on the media-created event called The Blair Witch Project," he said.

"It's also a movie that's full of ideas on how the media shapes events, about what we perceive as reality, about how violence in the media may affect us or may not," he added.

Since the original Web site was launched in April 1999, it has drawn more than 10 million unique users. The first film was released in June 1999.

"We continue to have good traffic on the original site, but the Web-fest is about something larger and Artisan hopes to create an online community around it. Overall, what makes the franchise unique is its mythology and folklore," said LeAnne Gayner, senior vice president of marketing for Artisan.

Hollywood insiders and Internet analysts credit Blair Witch for making Web marketing a mainstay, but many doubt the public would fall for the same trick twice.

"A lot of people felt kind of burned by the hype and thought the movie wasn't that great once they saw it," said Malcolm Maclachlan, an analyst with International Data Corp., an Internet research firm.

"When I found out it was all contrived and that they hired people to talk about it in the Internet chat rooms, I was angry. If anything, there may be a backlash this time," he said.

Indeed, hiring people to enter chat rooms and talk up films has become common practice in online film marketing. But industry sources say this kind of "guerilla marketing," is getting harder to pull off these days.

"The Blair Witch marked a turning point for film marketing online and demonstrated that the Web was a legitimate way to build an audience," said John Moshay, chief executive officer of DNA Studio, which develops Web strategies for movies.

DNA designed Web sites for films like Hollow Man, and Titan AE and industry sources say it was tapped to create the site for the highly anticipated Harry Potter movie.

As part of Artisan's Web-fest, it is also offering a file-sharing service, where users can swap creepy and scary images and music, much like music fans swap songs on the popular but controversial Napster program.

"People will be able to upoad images and music and audio elements that they would like to share with others. We've seen an onslaught of creativity from mock films, to art work and written material," Gayner of Artisan said.