9 Horror Movies That Made Actors QUIT Forever

The low-budget indie horror that popularised the found footage genre, The Blair Witch Project (1999) shows the journey of three young film students (Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael C Williams, playing fictionalised versions of themselves) as they attempt to film a documentary about the so-called local legend the Blair Witch. Losing themselves in the woods, things get turned up to 11, and soon the three are facing a fight for their sanity and their lives.

Donahue was at the forefront of all of this, her teary, snotty, close-up shots becoming not only the defining image of the film, but a much-parodied pop culture moment. Once audiences had been assured that the actors were indeed actors, and that all of them were safe and well, Donahue got the lion's share of media attention.

Exciting as this indubitably was, it failed to translate into new project capital, and a series of direct-to-video and TV films led her to quit the business and, umm, start growing marijuana... When that didn't pan out either, she went into writing about growing marijuana – both in autobiographical and fictionalised form. Today she is known as Rei Hance and, well, that's very likely all she wrote.