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Heather Donahue
Heather Donahue
Portrayed By: Heather Donahue
- Break the Haughty: Though friendly and reasonable, Heather is also a very overconfident and egotistical person in the beginning, and frequently quarrels with the others over the course of the expedition. The failure to escape the woods leads her closer and closer to a Despair Event Horizon, until she's left so dispirited that she's ultimately reduced to following Mike's lead.
- Control Freak: She's determined to remain in control of the expedition throughout, to the point of keeping the map and compass to herself, even as it becomes clear that she might just be in over her head. She later lambasts herself for this during her apology scene.
- Despair Event Horizon: The realization that they've been Going in Circles completely breaks Heather, leaving her in a sobbing, directionless heap. The disappearance of Josh only makes her even worse.
- Deteriorates Into Gibberish: In the ending. Heather's last words are to continuously scream for Mike, but as she grows more and more terrified, her words gradually dissolve into wordless, high-pitched shrieks.
- Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: It's revealed that Heather took one of the stick figure totems during their discovery - exactly the point in the expedition where the Witch starts getting really aggressive.
- It's All My Fault: Heather calls this on herself in the apology scene for getting Josh and Mike into their predicament.
- Jerkass Realization: Over the course of the film, Heather eventually realizes that she managed to get all herself and her companions lost and blames herself after Josh disappears.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Feels this way after Josh's disappearance, as it was her project that started this entire fiasco and quite likely would get all three of them killed. Unfortunately, she was right, as they were never seen again.
- Sanity Slippage: She gets more and more obsessive about recording footage of their expedition as it grows progressively more stressful, even as the others angrily snipe at her over it and continues filming even after she gives up on escaping altogether. Her diary in the Dossier elaborates on her mental collapse even further, with her writing becoming more distorted and bewildered over the course of her final days.
- Secret-Keeper: She chooses not to tell Mike about the satchel of Josh's bloody teeth.
- Stepford Smiler: At first, it just looks like she's just supremely confident in her abilities, but as the film continues, her plucky documentarian attitude is soon revealed to be her approach to dealing with stress, and as time goes on, it starts to look really strained - until it finally breaks.
- You Will Be Spared: It's speculated that reassembling the cairn Josh broke earned Heather a reprieve. Unfortunately, this leaves Heather psychologically broken from the stress of watching her friends disappear one by one, before the Witch presumably kills her as well.
Michael Williams
Michael Williams
Portrayed By: Michael C. Williams
- Break the Comedian: His sense of humor begins to fray as their time in the woods goes on longer than intended, his jokes giving way to shouted arguments with Heather and outright physical violence, until it finally stops after it turns out they've been Going in Circles. Now almost completely humourless, he tries to hold the group together in spite of himself, but the loss of Josh breaks even that tiny sliver of spirit.
- Despair Event Horizon: Josh's disappearance and hearing him scream for help in the middle of the night completely destroys what little remains of Mike's will to continue (which outlasted even Heather's determination), and he spends the remaining day psychologically lost.
- Heroic BSoD: After finding the stick figures in the wooded clearing, Mike finally snaps and starts screaming for help.
- Plucky Comic Relief: Initially, he's the source of most of the jokes among the filmmakers and clear fancies himself something of a comedian, though at times his sense of humor becomes a source of irritation to the others. He gets less funny as the film goes on and their predicament goes From Bad to Worse.
- Sole Survivor: Subverted. While he is the last to die and we don't see his death on camera, eventually he too is murdered by the Blair Witch or whatever the main antagonist was.
- Too Dumb to Live: Mike kicks the map into the river out of sheer frustration when they get lost. Not that it matters, since the witch can manipulate the woods to prevent them from leaving.
- Troubled Fetal Position: After Josh goes missing and they can't seem to find him, Mike begins to break down and cradles up in a fetal position, rocking himself. Heather goes to comfort him.
Joshua Leonard
Joshua Leonard
Portrayed By: Joshua Leonard
- Breaking Speech: Josh delivers a savage one to Heather when it becomes clear how hopeless their situation is.I wanna make movies, Heather. Isn't that what we came here to do? Just make some movies? Let's make some movies. Okay, here's your motivation. You're lost, you're angry in the woods. There's no one here to help you. There's a witch, and she keeps leaving shit outside your door. There's no one here to help you! She left little trinkets, you took one of them, she ran after us! There's no one here to help you! We walked for fifteen hours today and ended up in the same place! There's no one here to help you! That's your motivation! THAT'S YOUR MOTIVATION! ...You gonna write us a happy ending, Heather?
- Butt-Monkey: Josh. Everything bad happens after he accidentally knocks over a pile of rocks while filming at night. For the rest of the film, he in particular is targeted by what's after them.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: The full extent of his fate is never revealed, but it's implied to have been absolutely horrific, given that he's heard screaming in agony throughout the night following his disappearance and the bloody remains of his teeth and other organs are left outside Heather's tent the next morning.
- Finger in the Mail: After presumably killing him, the Witch leaves his teeth and other organs in a bundle of twigs outside Heather's tent.
- Heroic BSoD: The Witch's attack on the tent hits him hard, especially when it looks like she's singled him out by smearing blue slime over his things; at one point during the following day, he's so stressed that he's found crying alone and wearily asking if anyone has any cigarettes.
- Only Sane by Comparison: Josh is the only one of the three main characters who seems to have a relatively sane head on his shoulders and doesn't actively do anything to worsen their predicament; in fact, he only contributes to the deteriorating situation through an honest mistake... but as discussed in the Dossier, he's an underachiever and has a habit of psychologically shutting down when under stress.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: It is heavily implied that the three are being haunted because Josh accidentally knocked over one of the seven cairns they find in the woodland cemetery, as things only started getting spooky later that night and nothing happened when they camped the night before that. This never occurs to the trio, of course, since they are preoccupied with their current situation.
The Blair Witch
The Blair Witch
- Ambiguously Evil: In the background materials, it's unknown if Elly Kedward was really the Wicked Witch the people of Blair believed her to be, a genuinely well-intentioned witch, or just a harmless old woman on the receiving end of a paranoid witch-hunt.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Despite never even seeing the Blair Witch herself, or whatever the antagonist was, the way the film ends makes it obvious that she's won.
- Cruel Mercy: Those who are allowed to survive encounters with her are often left psychologically destroyed, as was the case with Rustin Parr, Kyle Brody, and Lane.
- Eldritch Abomination: The witch is never seen but seems to have power over everything going on in the woods, assuming she's even real. The Blair Witch games indicate that she's actually the avatar of an actual Eldritch Abomination known as the Hecaitomix.
- He Who Must Not Be Seen: The witch. Though there's been action figures, described by Cracked as looking "like Treebeard got it on with Swamp Thing".
- Regularly Scheduled Evil: Though not operating on as tight a schedule as some other supernatural woods creatures, the Blair Witch likes to pull some freaky shit every fifty or sixty years or so.
- Space Master: In both the original film and Blair Witch, the campers walk for considerable distance only to end up right back where they started. The eventual footage from Heather's expedition is discovered in the foundations of a Civil War-era house past several layers of undisturbed dirt, an impossible placement unless someone had literally teleported the film down there.
- Transhuman Abomination: Regardless of whether or not Elly Kedward was indeed a witch or simply a normal woman that fell prey to superstitious townsfolk, she was still very much a mortal human. However, after being tortured and Left for Dead in the Black Hills woods, she would go on to become an entity of terrible power, will and malevolence that would be responsible for a lengthy, ever-growing list of mass disappearances in the region throughout the centuries.
- Time Master: The Witch is implied to have a gift for playing around with time.
- The derelict house in the woods is identical to Rustin Parr's home, but that was burnt to the ground by an angry mob in the 40s.
- In The Blair Witch Project: A Dossier, experts are baffled by the events in Heather's footage, as the search parties should have been in the same place as the filmmakers at the same time, but none of them found anything of them at any point.
- Later, in Blair Witch, time becomes increasingly flexible in the Black Hills until the sun simply fails to rise, while Lane and Talia are only separated from the rest of the group for a few hours - but look and act as if they've been lost in the woods for days on end... and the footage the ultimately inspired the journey in the first place is actually revealed to be a snippet of film from the end of said journey, creating a Stable Time Loop.
- Unseen Evil: It is hinted that the Blair Witch is responsible for the strange events in Burkittsville's history, and none of the group's cameras ever catch her.
- Unperson: After the disappearance of half the town's children, the people of Blair vowed never to speak the name of Elly Kedward ever again.
- Voice Changeling: Hinted, as while Mike and Heather follow Josh's voice into the house where they eventually die, they never find a trace of Josh himself. Later confirmed in Blair Witch.
- Was Once a Man: Before becoming the formless menace that she is today, the Blair Witch was once an Irish immigrant by the name of Elly Kedward who fell afoul of a witch-hunt and was banished to the Black Hills woods - where she presumably died of exposure.
- Wicked Witch: The titular witch has killed children, been responsible for the deaths of many different people through history, and tortures, torments, and kills the protagonists of both The Blair Witch Project and Blair Witch.
- Would Hurt a Child: The Witch's first victims were roughly half the children in Blair, while the "Blair Witch Cult" book mentions her tearing a young boy's head off; later, she commanded Rustin Parr to murder seven children on her behalf.
