When it comes to horror movies, not every shrill shriek from its stars is fake.
More often than not, production on a thriller pic is as smooth-sailing as any other genre
film, but every so often the fright factor bleeds over into real life.
In the case of these scary movies, some of their cast members were left shaken by what
they experienced on set.
A Clockwork Orange
Stanley Kubrick's highly controversial adaptation of A Clockwork Orange is disturbing enough
for the viewer, let alone for the actor who starred in it.
"I've taught you much, my little droogies."
For the famous brainwashing scene in the film, lead actor Malcolm McDowell allowed his eyes
to be pinned open for every take.
Unfortunately, McDowell didn't leave unscathed: the physical torment caused him to suffer
from temporary blindness and a scratched cornea, and it took decades for him to be able to
watch the film and actually enjoy Kubrick's work.
"I would like to smash 'em."
The Birds
While filming The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock absolutely tormented his star actress, Tippi
Hedren, both on- and off-set.
Through manipulation, sexual slurs, and obsessive behaviors, the notoriously tough director
made Hedren live to regret her decision to star in his film.
The tipping point for Hedren, though, was when Hitchcock lied about the use of real
birds in a particular scene.
Instead of the mechanical birds used in the rest of the film, Hedren was duped into acting
with live ones that were hurled at her over a week of filming.
She left the set bruised, bloodied, and emotionally scarred.
"They really didn't need five days of that.
I don't know what it was, cruelty?
It was mean."
Psycho
Tippi Hedren wasn't the only one to experience a real-life fright on the set of a Hitchcock
film.
Janet Leigh was never quite the same after starring as Marion Crane in Psycho either.
She was so traumatized after watching herself in the famous shower scene that she became
too afraid to take showers and from that point forward, and only took baths.
"I don't take showers unless there's no other way to bathe, and in that case the door is
open, if they're sliding doors, the curtain is open.
If it's a curtain and the door to the bathroom is open, so that I can see out."
Rosemary's Baby
Mia Farrow went through quite a few traumatizing experiences while working on Roman Polanski's
American film debut, Rosemary's Baby.
A strict vegetarian, Farrow was asked by Polanski if she wouldn't mind eating raw chicken liver
for a scene.
Little did she know she would be forced to consume it over and over again for different
takes.
That's the kind of shooting experience that definitely leaves a bad taste in an actress'
mouth.
The Blair Witch Project
While The Blair Witch Project is a movie that's probably laughed at more than it actually
scares people nowadays, the disturbing ways in which the directors haunted the cast are
frightening enough on their own.
Filmed over an eight-day camping trip, there was little interaction between the cast and
directors.
Sure, they had daily meetings to provide the actors with more supplies and instructions
for where to go next, but the trio that starred in the pic were mostly on their own.
"You've got to be kidding me, this is a joke!"
To authentically scare the cast, directors also stalked the actors during the day, rattled
their tents while they were sleeping at night, and intentionally gave them less food as the
days progressed so they became more and more angry and exhausted.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose
Jennifer Carpenter might've been fine with all the sinister surgical procedures going
down on Dexter, but the actress got a case of the spooks during the production of The
Exorcism of Emily Rose.
While she was filming the religious thriller, some strange things started happening to her
after hours.
She told Dread Central,
"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 to experience such supernatural phenomena on the set, either;
co-star Laura Linney's television repeatedly turned itself on at night during the shoot.
Carpenter later chalked up these happenings to some electrical issue with the hotel where
they were staying …
"My stereo would come on really loudly and I wasn't listening to it, I didn't know if
there was a short in the plug or what, but it happened."
But she was also really glad the clock didn't read 3:00 AM when it happened, since that
was such a horrifyingly significant time in the movie.
The Conjuring
The real-life ghost-hunting history of Ed and Lorraine Warren is freaky enough to put
anyone on edge.
But Vera Farmiga knew very little about her real-life character counterpart before signing
the dotted line on The Conjuring and receiving her first paranormal encounter as a bonus.
The actress revealed that during her first round of research into Warren's work she had
a brush with the beyond after she hung up the phone with director James Wan.
As she told Cinema Blend, she opened her laptop to find "three digital claw marks, from the
upper right diagonal to the lower left."
Those marks would make a second unsettling arrival in Farmiga's Conjuring experience
the day after she finished shooting the first film and returned to her home in New York.
She woke up to find a similar set of markings on her thigh.
She explained,
"It was these three, very distinct, what looks like claw marks, that long nails [or] thin
fingertips could make."
She chose not to "give into the fear" of the moment and signed on for the second film,
which would give a different castmate a case of the creeps.
Patrick Wilson was no newbie to the scream scene before he joined The Conjuring series,
but the second installment of his ghost-hunting endeavor did freak him out the most.
According to him, there was a "pretty trippy" moment during production involving a curtain
haunting that led the crew to bring in a priest to bless the set.
He told Metro,
"It was a huge curtain that went from the floor to the ceiling, which was sort of waving
violently and there was no door open or fan on, no nothing."
"You didn't even hear any air, but you watched these curtains sort of violently going."
Wilson considers himself a skeptic, but all of his supernatural screenplay may have gotten
the better of him at this point, because he's admitted to believing his own house may be
haunted now.
He told The Independent,
"I've heard people on two different occasions say they've heard kids' laughter in the middle
of the night in my house."
Talk about taking work home with you.
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