Acting is perhaps the only job where work can get extremely intense or it could be downright stupid. There have been times after having watched a horror movie; we wonder how these actors get through acting and hooting for such terrifying and disturbing roles? It becomes a game of how well the actor guards his/her sanity and psychological/emotional wellbeing. While some are highly skilled at that when playing these haunting roles, others are not so well equipped or plain unlucky in that regard. Or simply there could be various factors gone wrong such as working with abusive directors, to method acting gone awry. This list is about some actors who signed up for roles in horror films which ended up messing with the minds.
1. Malcolm McDowell – A Clockwork Orange (1971)
The highly controversial Stanley Kubrick’s movie A Clockwork Orange is quite disturbing to the viewers. Imagine how much more frightening will it be for actor who starred in it. For the famous scene in the film, yes the brainwashing scene, Malcolm McDowell permitted his eyes to be pinned open for every take. Unluckily, he didn’t unscathed. The excruciating pain and physical torment left him with temporary blindness and a scratched cornea. We haven’t even gone near the psychological effects were even more painful than that.
2. Tippi Hedren – The Birds (1963)
During the filming of The Birds, the lead actress Tippi Hedren was tormented by her director Alfred Hitchcock, both on screen and off-set through sexual slurs, obsessive behaviours and manipulation. The snapping point for the actress was when Hitchcock lied that he was using mechanical birds for a particular scene when actually he was using real birds. After being fooled into acting with live birds that were hurled at her over a week of filming, she was left bruised, bloodied, and emotionally scarred.
3. Linda Blair – The Exorcist (1973)
Linda Blair was only 13 years of age when the movie was shot. The Exorcist is one of the most iconic horror movies in history. Being a child star in it couldn’t have been easy. Being so young then, Blair didn’t really know what was going on but she admits to experiencing lasting after effects from the movie. To her, it was simply acting. Sign of real trauma began to show after the release of the movie in 1973. Post-released, Blair found herself bombarded tons of questions about things such as possession, faith, and Catholicism and her young mind just wasn’t equipped to answer all that. She later tells Dread Central –
“To me The Exorcist was a work of fiction. I didn’t realize then that it dealt with anything in reality, and so when the press kept asking me about all the devil stuff, it just kept adding to the pressure I was under, and it was just an awful thing to go through as a teenager.”
4. Mia Farrow – Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
The set of Roman Polanski’s American film debut, Rosemary’s Baby was quite a depressing and traumatizing place for Mia Farrow. Farrow is a strict vegetarian. Polanski enquired of her if she wouldn’t mind eating raw chicken liver for a scene. She did not know that she would be forced to eat it over and over again for numerous takes. To add glumness to that, Frank Sinatra, Farrow’s then-husband served here divorce papers on-set and in front the entire cast and crew. What a douchebag! If that’s not depressing and traumatizing, we’re not sure what is.
5. The entire cast – The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Some are of the opinion that The Blair Witch Project is a movie that’s probably laughed at more than it actually scares people. However, disturbing stories of how the directors tormented and haunted the cast are scary enough in their own right. The movie was filmed over an eight-day camping trip (if I may call it that). In this duration, there was little to no interaction between the cast and directors when you leave out the daily meetings to provide the actors with more supplies and instructions for where to go next. To authentically frighten the cast, directors resorted to tactics of stalking the actors during the day, rattling their tents while they were sleeping at night and intentionally giving them less food as the days progressed so as to infuriate them as they become more exhausted.
6. Janet Leigh – Psycho (1960)
Here’s another trauma story from another Hitchcock horror film and what a classic it is. The actress Janet Leigh was never quite the same again after starring as Marion Crane in Psycho. After watching the famous shower scene, she becomes too traumatized to take shower. So traumatized was she that from that point on she never took shower, instead preferring baths. The movie is regarded as one of the darkest movies in film history and it affected not only Leigh but others involved with the film as well and that includes director Hitchcock included.
7. Kyle Richards – Halloween (1978)
Kyle Richards is now better known as a ‘real housewife of Beverly Hills.’ But her acting career goes way back. Before she was a soap star, she was a child actress in John Carpenter’s 1978 movie Halloween. She was just 9 years old at the time of the premiere of the movie after which she was traumatized. The premiere terrified her so much that she reportedly had to sleep with her mom until she turned 15. She always imagined that someone hiding under her bed or behind the curtains, waiting to get her. That was the first and the last time Richards ever acted in a horror film (unless her continued appearances on the actual horror show of the other kind that is Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
8. The cast – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Tobe Hooper can be one hell of a sick cruel dude. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s writer-director frightened the living soul out of people right on their seats in the theatre with the said movie. He unleashed his skin-mask-wearing maniac Leatherface (portrayed by Gunnar Hansen in the original) into the cinematic world. But that was not all. Behind the scene he also scared the daylights out of his own cast by concealing the character’s revolting look from them until it was time for action.
Until the cameras started rolling none of the stars knew about the ultra-creepy appearance of Leatherface all thanks to Hooper’s secrecy. The cameras started rolling for the sake of generating some hyperrealistic shrieks, and it worked. Later Hansen told Esquire that the dinner table scene where Sally (Marilyn Burns) was tormented was as brutal for the actress as it was for the character itself –
“The whole dinner scene is burned in my memory. I think just because of the misery of it. At that point we were really just on the verge of mental collapse. And Marilyn told me about how awful it was for because she was terrified … just being tied to a chair and then having these men looming over her constantly, she said it was really unnerving. I think that whole scene was certainly the most intense part of the movie, and I think all of us were slightly insane by then.”
Burns herself later told Hansen, “I thought you were really going to hurt me. You couldn’t see through your stupid mask.”
9. Jennifer Carpenter – The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)
Creepy Creepy disturbing roles are sort of Jennifer Carpenter’s thing with roles in shows such as Dexter. As Debra Morgan in Dexter, she might’ve been fine with all the sinister surgical procedures going down but the actress got the chills and spooks during shooting of The Exorcism of Emily Rose. She told Dread Central about the strange happenings after hours during the production of the religious thriller. Spooky stuffs like her radio randomly turning on in the middle of the night were common. She says, “Two or three times when I was going to sleep my radio came on by itself. The only time it scared me was once because it was really loud, and it was Pearl Jam’s ‘Alive.'”
She wasn’t the only one on the set to experience such supernatural phenomena. Her co-star Laura Linney’s reports about her television repeatedly turned itself on at night during the shoot. Carpenter later blames these happenings to some electrical issue with the hotel where they were staying. However, but she was also really glad the clock didn’t read 3:00 AM when it happened. That’d be too spooky since that was such a horrifyingly significant time in the movie.
10. JoBeth Williams – Poltergeist (1982)
This petrifying 1982 classic is widely considered to be one of the most cursed film sets in all of horror films history. Various mysterious tragedies are associated with the film. Some mishaps include, first, during production Oliver Robbins who essayed the role of Robin Freeling had a near-death experience with the clown puppet. Second, young actress Heather O’Rourke died from a misdiagnosed intestinal abnormality a few years after the movie’s release and thirdly, Dominique Dunne was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in her driveway.
JoBeth Williams, who played the role of the kids’ mother, was petrified by screenwriter-producer Steven Spielberg’s insistence on using real human skeletal remains as props? At home, she began to notice weird happenings in her home at the time and that shocked her out of her wits. As she explained during her Reddit AMA –
“Because we were supposed to be scared so much, I think everybody’s nerves were hypersensitive. I didn’t live in L.A. then, so I was in a rented apartment, and I began to notice that every night when I would come home from shooting, exhausted, fried, the pictures on the walls would be crooked. And I would straighten them. And the next day, I would come in, and the pictures would be crooked again.”
She later rationalized that the chills were of her own making as she slammed the door too hard on her way out, But then again there were times she wasn’t too convinced with that explanation.
