The Blair Witch Project might narratively be about three filmmakers trekking into the woods to uncover a local legend, but it plays for the audience as a haunting example of the misogyny that women filmmakers face on a daily basis.
That thesis statement is just about as strong as anything Heather Donahue’s Heather Donahue would have written, and that’s because she is a great filmmaker! She’s at least attempting to be one, saddled by two film bros on-location in Maryland for the documentary she’s been producing. She knows videographer Josh well enough, he’s the one that recommended their sound guy Mike, and she’s prepared for this. Post-its line the books she’s borrowed for research, her eyes are like a hawk’s, constantly tracing the space and seeking The Shot.
Heather Donahue is this documentary’s director, Mike and Josh are presumably freelance support she’s hired to make it happen, and while they enthusiastically readied themselves for a scout-it-out project at the top of the film, the moment things become even slightly difficult, both Mike and Josh fold like a chair in Mary Brown’s mobile home.
For this, Heather is also the crew’s metaphorical eldest daughter: the one that looks out for others but is never looked out for by anyone else. She has a strong vision, and she’s also developed a thick skin and a series of tools to survive. She makes jokes to ease tensions, coaches her team through difficult moments, offers steady and sound filming advice that is mostly waved off or ignored.
As Mike and Josh start descending into madness, their director keeps a cool head; Heather’s ability to stick to the task at hand, be it filming a documentary or surviving the night, reinforces her leadership capabilities, though this is completely lost on the men she’s working with, as well as the audience at home watching it all unfold.
The character of Heather Donahue was despised upon the film’s release in 1999, a well-documented phenomenon that made future work difficult for star Rei Hance, then professionally known as Heather Donahue. Production marketed the film as a true story, and the three stars were kept out of the public eye during the film’s release to keep up the charade. Pair that with the use of their real identities, and a dead actor isn’t one you can easily cast in another project. After the media blitz died down a bit, Joshua Leonard continued on with acting, while Michael Williams took an early on-screen retirement to become an educator. Both men managed to escape the wave of hatred aimed at Heather and by extension Rei.
In a 2016 interview with Vice, Hance recalls:
“I don’t think there were a lot of female characters like that in movies at the time. Definitely I feel like things have changed a lot. There’s been a little more leeway for female characters. I won the Razzie for worst actress that year, and I think that was partly because of the character being judged, rather than the performance. She was a very driven woman who didn’t wear mascara and was on camera in 1999.”
The Blair Witch Project’s blurred reality made the film popular, but it also led to blurred lines for the stars at its center. Audiences wanted a witch, and they got one in Heather, the only woman on-screen and the narrative scapegoat for the crew’s ongoing problems. She wasn’t an in-universe filmmaking genius, she was a bitch, leading our poor, defenseless buddies right to the door of an evil entity. But that’s also a feature of the way the film is inherently crafted: when you never actually show the villain, audiences are going to make up their own.
“It’s very hard for me to talk about the backlash because for me it was so directly personal.” says Hance. “It was my mother getting sympathy cards, it was people coming up to me on the street telling me that they wished I was dead, saying they want their money back. It was me in my 84 Toyota Celica breaking down in LA in La Cienega underneath a billboard with my own face on it. It was a profoundly surreal experience.”
The creators of The Blair Witch Project found success with the concept of a witch hunt movie, and with Heather they found a way for audiences to burn one at the stake every time they watched.
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Since its initial release, Haxan Films has made between $35 million and $40 million in profit from the movie and its related ventures. Original cast members Rei Hance, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams have not only seen a fraction of that fortune, but sued Artisan for using their likenesses and names without permission when production started on a sequel, a lawsuit that eventually reached a settlement that granted each actor $100,000.
Rei herself has had a complicated relationship with the experience, legally changing her name in 2020 after the film threw her into an identity crisis:
“At 25, I was in a surprise indie blockbuster, The Blair Witch Project. I found myself on the cover of Newsweek around the same time I learned that my name was the studio’s intellectual property. This demanded a reset to my whole sense of identity. Not to mention they publicly asserted I was dead until the Newsweek thing–that added a layer of existential chaos.”
Today, Rei is a writer, gardener, podcast host, cannabis farmer, and seems to have found a sense of peace following the camping trip that changed her life. In the canon of horror, The Blair Witch Project will be remembered for a lot of things. But on this, her glorious silver anniversary, I hope the film will be remembered for the woman at the true center of it all, a standout among the three green actors that made one of the most successful horror films of all time the juggernaut it was, one I suppose some are apt to call a witch. To me, she’s an auteur, a storyteller, a shapeshifter, and a goddamn legend.
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