Starring: Kim Director, Jeffrey Donovan, Erica Leerhsen, Tristine Skyler, Stephen Barker Turner

Eager to cash in on the runaway success of microbudget The Blair Witch Project, the studio fast-tracked a sequel with a leftfield choice – documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger (the Paradise Lost Trilogy; Metallica: Some Kind of Monster). Rather than replicating the found footage experience, something Berlinger found disingenuous, his pitch was to skewer the concept of manipulative marketing with a story involving a group of young Blair Witch fanatics who reject that the movie is fiction, setting out to find proof of what they believe is real.

Notoriously altered by meddling studio execs looking to have more sensational gore and a Marilyn Manson-forward soundtrack, as released theatrically Book of Shadows strayed from Berlinger’s vision. Over the twenty years since its release, a cult following has emerged, attaching to the core of the movie that retains the originally intended ideas. For this one night only event, Berlinger joins us in person following a screening on 35mm film to discuss the fraught history of the making of the movie, and how it reads decades later.