Heather Donahue and her castmates in the horror film classic are demanding their rights from Lionsgate
Lydia Tár is back. More than a year after its release, Todd Fields’ ‘Tár’ is back in the headlines following the denunciation of a legal settlement over uan iconic piece of audio from ‘The Blair Witch Project’ which was reused in the filmin which Cate Blanchett plays a fictional EGOT-winning conductor whose ego and abuses of power become her undoing.
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Although the specters of her misdeeds haunt Lydia throughout, the film veers into some moments of genuine horror, especially during a scene in which Lydia runs through a Berlin park and suddenly hears a young woman screaming off-screen. . According to Rei Hance (formerly Heather Donahue), lead actress of ‘The Blair Witch Project’, that scream is hers. and has been removed from the crucial scene in which his character is attacked and killed by an unseen supernatural force.
This problem between actors and Lionsgate goes back a long way, and in a recent interview with Variety, Hance alleged that his voice was included without his permission or that of the distributor Lionsgate. Hance said he alerted Lionsgate to the allegedly unauthorized use of the clip, but claimed that the studio eventually reached an independent deal with ‘Tár’ distributor Focus Features, leaving her out to seek her own compensation. (Focus declined to comment to Variety when asked about the alleged legal settlement.)
In 2022, an anonymous member of Tár’s production team told Indiewire that the scream in the park scene was an original creation and not a Blair sample, something that can easily be proven not to be true. Lionsgate told IndieWire it had no comment. Hance and her ‘The Blair Witch Project’ co-stars revealed to Variety that they have suffered online harassment and have struggled to make ends meet, despite being one of the most profitable independent films in history.
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