Random Wild Details Cast And Crew Has Revealed About Making 'Blair Witch Project' (14 items)

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  (#1) Heather Donahue

  • Actor

  After Donahue won the part of Heather, her family feared the premise of a low-budget horror movie was just a ruse to get her into the woods alone. According to Donahue's co-star Joshua Leonard:

  Heather’s parents were worried Ed and Dan might be taking her out into the woods to make a snuff movie.

  Donahue herself added:

  The initial reaction of my loved ones was that I definitely should not go into the woods with a bunch of guys I didn't know. My mom wanted to know if she could have all of their Social Security numbers. All of my friends pitched in to make sure that I bought a knife.
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  (#9) Donahue's Audition Was So Good That Filmmakers Changed The Role For Her

  Auditions for the movie's lead roles involved improvisation from the moment each actor entered the room with Myrick and Sánchez. Originally the filmmakers wanted to have three men as the college students lost in the Maryland woods while looking for the Blair Witch. However, once Donahue entered the picture, the role changed to that of a woman. 

  In 2015, Donahue told The Week how she landed the part:

  When we went into audition, he asked us to improvise, and my improv was: "You have been in prison. You've served nine years of a 25-year sentence, but you're up for parole. Why should we let you out?" And I guess I was the only person that said, "I don't think you should."
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  (#13) Filming Lasted 24 Hours A Day For Eight Days Straight

  Donahue, Leonard, and Williams really filmed and recorded audio for the entire film, explaining the shaky movements and sometimes poor sound quality of the finished product. This created an atmosphere where the cameras and the actors had to be on 24 hours a day throughout the eight-day shoot. 

  Myrick explained:

  We just led them around on a 24-hour-a-day stage play, really. We set up all the set pieces before hand, and they would just follow our directions...We shook their tent, we played sounds of little kids playing outside their tent, we made noises in the middle of the night, we led them to this crazy house at the end—we basically just played the Blair Witch.
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  (#7) The Crew Spent Nights Finding Low-Fi Ways To Scare The Actors

  Free of the big budget of Hollywood blockbusters, the crew had to think outside the box to create scares for the actors to encounter. Not only did filmmakers control how much information about the Blair Witch each cast member possessed, they also allowed them to believe the legend was real and not created for the film. Actual townspeople included plants meant to lead the cast to different conclusions or provide further detail about the mythology to create a sense of reality about it.

  As Donahue, Leonard, and Williams filmed, the crew stayed out of sight. During the night, the crew dressed in dark colors or camouflage clothing in order to snap branches in the woods, slam their hands on tent walls, or make creepy noises to antagonize the cast. Not every scare worked as it was supposed to, according to Myrick:

  We had this whole plan of having this guy - this creepy moment where there might have been an analysis where if someone looks closely there'd be a little glow-y, white humanoid figure in the woods somewhere. We had a friend of ours dress up in white long johns and be parked off in the woods just between the trees, and our hope was that as the camera was running, it would catch a little glimpse of this guy. That was what Heather was reacting to [when running through the woods], saying "What the f*ck is that?" but we never got it to read on camera. I felt bad for the guy, because it was pretty cold that night and he fell into the water. We had to take our clothes off to get to him. A lot of work for no end result, except for, "What the f*ck is that?"
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  (#12) GPS Led The Actors From One Scene Location To The Next

  Filmmakers scouted out the locations for camping or other important scenes in advance, programming each one into GPS devices. Myrick told The Guardian:

  Using GPS, we directed them to locations marked with flags or milk crates, where they’d leave their footage and pick up food and our directing notes.

  Sánchez told Vice:

  Gregg was in charge of the whole waypoint GPS thing, the way we got them from one location to the next in the woods without leading them. He had to give them a lesson in how to work the GPS tracker, just stuff like that, basic survival stuff, basic safety things, like if something happened what would you do.
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  (#3) The Actors Were So Uncomfortable One Night They Fled To A Hotel

  The filming of The Blair Witch Project did not involve a sound stage but an actual forest in rural Maryland where the actors slept in tents. Over the course of the finished movie, it becomes clear the weather is chilly and some scenes even have rain. Donahue, Leonard, and Williams actually had to sleep in the elements, leading to a night where they refused to spend another night miserable. According to Donahue:

  We left the woods and found the first house that we went to and knocked on the door. The guys were like, "You have to go, you have to go, because if a guy knocks on the door at a house in the woods at night, nobody is going to let them in!" So I knocked on the door, and I'm like, "I'm sorry, we're supposed to be lost in the woods, but we're not, and we have to call these guys!" They were weirdly nice enough and trusting enough to let us in, and they gave us hot cocoa. We ended up staying in a hotel that night.

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