The Burkittsville 7

This show was broadcast by Showtime after the cable network's first showing of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, not only to help build the Blair Witch myth but also as a reason for audiences to watch after they already knew that the movie was fiction.

As in all the other Blair Witch stories, the more the "experts" try to prove that the Blair Witch doesn't exist, the viewer is teased to believe all the more that she does exist. This particular installment in the "saga" tells us more about Rustin Parr, but adds the interesting idea that Parr was not the murderer he was thought to be. Instead, suspicion falls on Kyle Brody, the only survivor of the murders for which Parr was executed.

Apart from TV broadcasts, this is available on a "Collector's Edition" video The Burkittsville 7 with a trailer for BW2, and also on a video The Massacre of the Burkittsville 7 which also includes The Shadow of the Blair Witch. It can also be found on the R2 PAL special edition DVD of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. I saw the first video. The video box gives the running time as approximately 52 minutes, but I'm not sure that's correct.

This is a pretty interesting fake documentary, like The Curse of the Blair Witch that came before it. This one focuses on Chris Carrazco, a serial killer buff and film archivist who researched Rustin Parr extensively because of his local connections. Carrazco takes more of a look at Kyle Brody, a child Rustin Parr was accused of abducting, and the only such child who lived. He takes a closer look at some of the footage of Brody in a film titled White Enamel, a documentary about Maryland mental institutions - think Titicut Follies (1967). Carrazco also manages to get more footage of Brody from the director of White Enamel that had been cut.

In the institution, Kyle Brody chants what sounds like "never given," something Rustin Parr was supposed to have said too. It goes unexplained here, but evidently the computer game Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr (2000) (VG) gets into it a little bit. Additionally, from 2000-2002, the blairwitch website had a page regarding languages in connection with Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, and a pop-up on "Native American Twana" touched on this as well, but while the Internet Archive site has the languages page archived, it does not seem to have that pop-up archived.

Brody also appears to write in Transitus Fluvii ("Crossing the River"), a magical Hebraic alphabet that had been found in Parr's home. However, people watching the footage disagree as to whether the characters he was scribbling were Transitus Fluvii or not.

I didn't care for The Blair Witch Project, but I liked The Curse of the Blair Witch, and I liked this one too. I didn't recognize any of the actors except for the actor who played the director, since he went on to play the autopsy doctor on CSI. All the actors do a good job, though. The soundtrack is good, somewhat reminiscent at times of the excellent score for BW2.

While The Burkittsville 7 doesn't mention Titicut Follies, director (and documentarian) Joe Berlinger mentions it in his commentary track to Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000) during the first scenes of Jeff Patterson in the institution. In fact, both The Burkittsville 7 and BW2 have a scene of a character being fed a liquid through a rubber hose fed down their nose - perhaps such a scene is in Titicut Follies, which I haven't seen.

The Burkittsville 7 is mentioned in, and watched by characters in, the 2000 book The Secret Confession of Rustin Parr by D.A. Stern. The priest Dominick Cazale, who is briefly in The Burkittsville 7 is given much more time in this book. There's also more information about the Brody family, and some about Rustin Parr - but not as much as you'd think, given the title. The photos of the children Rustin Parr was supposed to have abducted are also reproduced in the book.