The Blair Witch Project's Heather Donahue: ''Nothing I do will ever surpass what I did at 24''
The movie's Heather was dead to the world, resurrected, and had to prove she was alive again, all before her mid-20's.
The Blair Witch Project: A cultural phenomenon
It's hard now to understand just how massive of a deal The Blair Witch Project was. For a brief moment in time, it was inescapable. While some of the luster has been lost to the decades of parodies and rip-offs, that initial wave of Blair Witch was like a bomb going off in the moviemaking industry. The film was revolutionary, both in its production and in the way it was marketed.
Viral before viral
Unless you were there, at a certain perfect age when The Blair Witch Project was released, you can really only grasp at how seismic a shift it was. There was the entire campaign that preceded the movie, predicated on missing posters and mysterious websites touting the deaths of the movie's actors. In hindsight, it might seem obvious that the actors didn't really die, but at the time, there was such little known about The Blair Witch Project. Those deaths could've been possible, and that was the entire appeal.
Heather Donahue: Dead, but not entirely
In 2016, Heather Donahue, the star of The Blair Witch Project, reflected on dying in the movie, and kind of in real life, too:
My obituary was published when I was 24. It’s a complicated thing to be dead when you’re still very much alive and eager to make a name for yourself. It said I was dead on IMDB, a site that was new when I first died in 1999 – a time when people still believed everything on the internet was true.
Star, writer, and choreographer
The movie's improvisational nature meant that its actors wore many hats. The script was so bare-bones that the stars, like Donahue, had to come up with most of their own dialogue. There wasn't much direction provided, so they also came up with their own blocking and acting beats.
"We shot it and independently provided the impetus for many of the scenes you see in the film, but we were not directors. While this work became record-breakingly profitable, what we were was dead."
Life after the Blair Witch Project
After she died in The Blair Witch Project, and on the internet, Heather Donahue struggled to resurrect her life offscreen. She moved away from LA in 2007 to seek some peace in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. She later co-created an independent comedy pilot called The High Country. But despite her efforts, most folks know her best as the girl running away from the Blair Witch.
"Nothing I do will ever surpass what I did at 24. My name and face are forever going to be someone else’s intellectual property."
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