Hauntings, burials, and the battle from hell — sometimes
TV frightens actors more than the audience.
As all of the murder, war, and manipulation comes to a head toward the end of the eight-season run
of HBO's epic fantasy Game of Thrones, the contestants for the Iron Throne become ever
more vicious in their play for power. The second-to-last episode of Season 6,
"The Battle of the Bastards," depicts a bloody, pivotal battle for Winterfell, fought by the
armies of would-be King in the North, Jon Snow, and the cruel upstart, Ramsay Bolton.
"You're going to die tomorrow, Lord Bolton.
Sleep well."
Filming that elaborate, ambitious battle required 25 shooting days, 500 extras, 600 crew members,
and 70 horses. This means that pretty much everything that is depicted on the screen
was very real — much to the terror of the actor who portrayed Jon Snow, Kit Harington.
At one point in the episode, a horde of enemy soldiers move in for the kill,
and it wasn't done with CGI — there really was a large group of men running straight at,
into, and on top of Harington. He's buried under bodies at one point,
all of which was a bit too much for the actor. He later told The Belfast Telegraph:
"I've got a few fears, spiders being one of them, but the worst is my claustrophobia — I'm mortally
afraid of crowds. I panic. It was one of the most terrifying things and most uncomfortable."
Debuting on The CW in January 2017, the very first sequence in the very first episode of
Riverdale makes it clear that the show will play out much differently to the
old-fashioned Archie Comics upon which it is based. After some ominous establishing shots
of the titular city, the action switches to the banks of the Sweetwater River,
where identical twins Jason and Cheryl Blossom board a small boat and head out
on the water — a journey that will leave Jason dead and his sister traumatized.
Even shooting that scene was tough for Madaleine Petsch,
who has a pronounced phobia of deep, large bodies of water. She later told Glamour:
"I assumed they'd use a stunt double in the boat. When I got to set,
they were like, 'So we're gonna put you in a wetsuit.'"
It didn't help that costar Trevor Stines was in charge of operating the boat,
something he'd never done before. Petsch said:
"I was having a panic attack. No one knew I was freaking out. I was terrified of stepping in the
boat, but then I got in and Trevor was amazing. It was great therapy, but I was still terrified."
Like many people, Gabourey Sidibe prefers her ghosts to remain as
little more than special effects. But a supernatural experience made
her think a real spirit showed up for one scene in American Horror Story: Coven.
In episode 12, Sidibe's character, Queenie, recites a Latin spell to conjure an audience
with Papa Legba, the gatekeeper to the spirit world. During An Evening
with the Women of American Horror Story, Sidibe said that as she spoke the words,
the light fixture above her started to shake, and she felt like she couldn't move.
While shooting another part of the scene, the light fixture crashed to the floor,
and she felt a finger running up her chin to her bottom lip, which started to swell.
Sidibe and a makeup artist went to a trailer to wait for medical treatment... and suddenly began
to hear scratching noises on the walls outside. They only stopped when the makeup artist said
a prayer and clapped her hands. Perhaps understandably, Sidibe refused to say the
Latin summoning words again. But she relented for the final episode, when the other actors
struggled to get the hang of them. This time, her top lip swelled up. As she herself said:
"Do not do this at home, you guys."
The relationship between vampire killer Buffy Summers and the ageless,
vicious vampire Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was all kinds of
complicated. He wanted to kill her, she wanted to kill him, and then he became
an undead living experiment with an implant that removed his desire to kill — you know,
the usual boy-meets-girl stuff. But somewhere early on, in the Season 6 episode "Seeing Red,"
Spike was still an evil monster who was quite willing to commit unspeakable acts.
According to Spike actor James Marsters, creator Joss Whedon urged the Buffy writers to take their
worst and darkest real-life memories and put them into scripts. "Seeing Red" was informed by a staff
writer's recollection of trying to win back an ex by forcing them into a sexual encounter,
so the script called for a desperate Spike to try that with Buffy. Marsters told The A.V. Club:
"It was the hardest day of my professional life. I was curled up in a fetal position in
between takes. I can't watch scenes like that. It was just unbelievably hard. But
again I'm glad we did it. Spike was evil, and I think a lot of people forgot about that."
In 1979, the second ever adaptation of a Stephen King book hit screens: a Salem's Lot miniseries,
based on the author's story about a small town ravaged by vampires. Directed by Tobe Hooper,
the Salem's Lot limited series featured one of the scariest and thus most indelible TV moments of
the time. Young Ralphie Glick, transformed into a pale-faced, monstrous vampire, floats outside the
bedroom window of his brother Danny and scratches at the glass, imploring him to let him in.
The look in Ron Scribner's eyes came not from an actor trying to best convey
his character, but some rather extreme discomfort. He later told Vanity Fair:
"It was probably the pain from the contact lenses digging into my eyeballs."
Danny ultimately doesn't survive his brother's vampirism, and this led to
Brad Savage having to film a graveyard scene as an undead boy. Apparently dead,
Danny hangs out in a coffin until he can drink the blood of the local gravedigger. Savage later said:
"Honestly, out of my whole childhood career,
that was the creepiest experience. They literally put me in a coffin and lowered me down eight,
10 feet into a hole. That was probably the most damage done to my psyche."