- This is an article about Heather Donahue's documentary proposal. For information about the movie released by Artisan Entertainment, see The Blair Witch Project (movie).
The Blair Witch Project was a student film thesis by Heather Donahue for her film class with Michael DeCoto.
History[]
Dated April 18, 1994, The Blair Witch Project was to be a documentary about the Burkittsville-area legend of the Blair Witch. Donahue intended to tell the story of the Blair Witch through interviews with Burkittsville natives, local law enforcement officials on the Rustin Parr case, and folklore experts. The heart of the documentary would be a weekend hike into the Black Hills Forest to visit some of the locations associated with the legend.
Joshua Leonard was hired as the director of photography and his friend Michael Williams did sound. The three students went missing in the Black Hills Forest and were never found.
On October 16, 1995, students from the University of Maryland discovered a bag containing films belonged to the missing students. The footage of the unmade documentary were turned over to the Burkittsville Police as evidence. The police analyzed the recovered footage whom they deemed the last footage showing the last moments of the missing students to be faked. The footage were kept in the police's possession until its legal limit of its classification ran out on October 16, 1997 and turned over to the families of the missing students. Angie Donahue, the mother of Heather, contacted the film company Haxan Films to assemble the footage and piece together the events of October 20 - 28, 1994.