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You need an Alias directive in your Apache configuration so your static files are served.
Unlike templates, which are rendered through Django views prior to being served, static files are generally served directly by the web server (or some separate service) for performance. After all you generally only want the file itself, so the overhead Django requires is unnecessary. This is discussed in Django’s documentation here.
Without the Alias directive, the request is passed to Django for handling. Django changes the default behavior of Apache from serving files from DocumentRoot directly, to mapping URLs to views which then construct the response. So, depending on your urls.py arrangement, the static file request might result in a 404 page or a response (the HTML you’re seeing) from a matching view.
To solve this, you can add
Alias /static/ /var/www/html/<project name>/static/
to your virtual host in your configuration file. This will tell Apache to serve files from your static directory when a request is made at a URI beginning with /static/.
For example, a URI of /static/index.js will cause Apache to serve the file /var/www/html/<project name>/static/index.js as a response.
Additionally you have an error in your VirtualHost. The address you’re providing it is <project name>, which is not a valid option (see here). The virtual host address must be either an IP address, domain name, or the wildcard *.
Since <project name> is none of these, the virtual host is not matched to the anything, and the configuration within it is not applied. I would suggest fixing it by changing
<VirtualHost <project name>:8000>
to
<VirtualHost *:8000>
which will instead match on any host expected by the request.