It’s a year since The Blair Witch Project shocked the box office, and the Maryland town of Burkittsville is struggling with its newfound fame. Among the locals exploiting it is Jeff (Jeffrey Donovan), who sells the trademark stick figures over the Internet and has started a tour of the sites made famous in the film. The clients on the maiden run include Erica (Erica Leerhsen), a self-righteous wiccan, Kim (Kim Director), a spunky goth girl, and Tristen (Tristen Skyler) and Stephen (Stephen Barker Turner), a couple writing a book about it. They all fall asleep in the woods with the cameras on and then try to figure out what happened during the lost hours.

The flashbacks to ritual murder and flashforwards to a police investigation make the mystery pretty obvious, but Shadows stretches things out by having Jeff tinker with his tapes and his clients bicker and go berserk while Berlinger toys with chronology and film formats and gratuitous allusions. What’s real and what isn’t proves elusive and irrelevant; what looks certain is that there won’t be a Blair Witch 3.