her over the balcony, killing her. Later, Jeff, Stephen, and Kim are arrested and interrogated by police. Each claim that a possessed Tristen was responsible. Their accounts are contradicted by various video footage: Security cameras captured Kim murdering the store cashier with her own nail file, while Jeff's home monitors show him, nude, hiding Erica's body in the closet; the DV footage Jeff filmed during Tristen's confrontation shows her pleading for her life as they accuse her of being a witch, ending in Stephen mercilessly pushing her to her death. Meanwhile, as Jeff, Kim, and Stephen are shown this footage by police, funeral mourners arrive in the woods to remember the other tour group that was murdered. Cast Production Development After the massive success of The Blair Witch Project, Artisan was eager to produce a sequel while the film's popularity was still at its peak. However, Haxan Films, who created the original film, was not ready to begin work on a follow-up, preferring to wait until the initial buzz had died down. In December 1999, Artisan decided to proceed without them, hiring Joe Berlinger, known for his work on true crime documentaries (this was his first and last narrative film for nineteen years), to direct. While developing the screenplay, Berlinger spent time in the real town of Burkittsville (the setting of The Blair Witch Project) undertaking research and interviewing locals on how the release of the film had impacted their lives. Many of the individuals Berlinger interviewed served as direct inspirations for the characters featured in the film. His core theme when composing the screenplay with Dick Beebe was that the evil attributed to the Blair Witch may "be human in origin as opposed to supernatural". According to Berlinger, the character of Erica represented an aspect of this, specifically the frustrations that the Wiccan community voiced after the release of The Blair Witch Project, which some felt misconstrued the tenets of Wicca and showed their religion in a negative light. Berlinger was also inspired by the "lazy consumption of media" that led many to accept The Blair Witch Project as a true documentary; specifically, "how readily [the public is] willing to accept that something shot on video is real". He elaborated: "On one hand, Blair Witch 2 works as a standard horror movie...but it also is a meditation on violence in the media, and the nature of fanaticism and obsession...and