Heather Donahue Really Thought She Might Be Murdered While Making ‘The Blair Witch Project’

The Blair Witch Project (1999) is an important 90s horror movie. It follows three student filmmakers working on a documentary about a Maryland urban legend, the Blair Witch. Camping in the woods, the filmmakers hope to capture evidence of the witch’s existence, but instead find themselves hopelessly lost and terrorized each night by an unseen person or entity.

Marketing for the film blurred the lines between fiction and reality by using “Missing” fliers of the three actors who play filmmakers in the movie and insisting that the film is made up of the “real” found footage they left behind. The ploy was incredibly successful and Blair Witch ended up earning $248.6 million against a budget of just $200,000. This movie didn’t originate the found footage subgenre, but it did popularize it.

The blurring of the line between fiction and reality extended to filming the movie as well. The three “filmmaker” actors weren’t told that the “Blair Witch” legend is actually completely fictitious. Additional actors were hired to pretend to be townspeople aware of the legend that the three “filmmakers” would then interview them about. The three filmmaker actors were able to capture footage of themselves being terrified because they were all actually afraid.

The three main actors—Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard—were actually forced to sign a release form agreeing to let the producers “mess with their heads”. In addition to the fake townspeople, producers would frighten the actors at night by shaking their tent, snapping twigs and playing tapes of children playing. They also gave the actors increasingly small portions of food and set up situations so the actors would feel frustrated and alone, which would make them more succeptible to overreacting to anything scary.

However, even before the producers set out to scare Heather Donahue, she was already preparing for a worst case scenario. Donahue was doing improv comedy when she came across the casting notice for Blair Witch. Because the project was so bizarre and mysterious (before found footage and reality TV, not a lot of casting notices were for actors willing to camp in the woods and pretend to make a movie for 8 days) and because she didn’t know the men she’d be sleeping alone in the woods with, she brought a “giant” knife with her in her pack.

I brought a giant knife because everybody who loved me was telling me, ‘You should not do this. This sounds like a snuff film. Why are you going into the woods with a bunch of guys you don’t know?

Heather Donahue, Paper Magazine

Of course, Donahue ended up not needing to protect herself from her castmates. The knife stayed in her bag while the three of them were terrorized by producers and their own imaginations. The movie went on to be a huge success and the biggest drawback for the actors ended up being the misconception that they had all disappeared and died in the Maryland wilderness.

Further reading:

• 41 Fascinating Facts About ‘The Blair Witch Project’
• 50+ Found Footage Horror Movies: The Definitive List