Brutal Things Horror Movies Did For Genuine Reactions

The question of how to get the most authenticity possible out of actors has been riling up filmmakers for as long as the film medium has existed. William Wyler ("Ben-Hur") did 40 takes; Robert Bresson ("Pickpocket") insisted on simple movements and monotone line deliveries; Italian Neorealists cast people off the street; Robert Altman ("Nashville") let actors improvise; Andrei Tarkovsky ("Solaris") kept them in the dark about how the story would end. 

When it comes to horror, the quest becomes even more daunting: How do you convince viewers that the people they're seeing on screen are genuinely disturbed and terrified, while also securing enough distance between actors and characters to keep the shoot sustainable? Some films have attempted to split the difference by instilling genuine scares, discomfort, and emotional distress on their actors. Others assembled their respective violent scenarios to within an inch of their lives, placing performers into circumstances that were only marginally less dangerous than their characters'. 

In some cases, the efforts of the cast and crew could be reasonably described as fearless commitment to their craft, or simply shrewd, harmless scare tactics with the aim of getting a good jolt in the first take. In others, the directors' behavior went decidedly too far, either recklessly or cynically betraying the #1 universal rule of filmmaking: to ensure the safety and wellbeing of all actors and crew members above anything else. From the cute to the callous, here are some notable examples of horror movies and their filmmakers that went out of their way for the sake of genuine reactions.

There has never been another film quite like "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre." Where so much of the slasher genre goes for heightened, fantastical violence and mayhem set against a cushion of familiarity and comfort, Tobe Hooper's totemic 1974 classic is all grime, all queasiness, all the time. In a way, its production was the ultimate triumph of low-budget filmmaking: ugly locations, crude setpieces, and modest production values all put in service of a descent into a discomfitingly tactile hell. In fact, for the actors, the horror may have been a little too tactile.

To achieve his vision on a shoestring budget, Hooper commandeered a grueling, seven-days-a-week shoot that had actors hallucinating from the sweltering Texas heat. Gunnar Hansen was prohibited from taking off his Leatherface suit, and by the end of the month-long production, his stench had become nearly unbearable. The various morbid decorations around the cannibal family's household consisted of real animal carcasses injected with formaldehyde. The prop knife in the finger-slitting scene wouldn't work, and an impatient Hansen ended up cutting Marilyn Burns' finger for real and drawing actual drops of blood for Grandpa (John Dugan) to suck on. One particular scene had Hansen holding a real revving chainsaw up close to Bill Vail's face. The end result was a masterpiece of putrescence and discomfort — but it's certainly for the best that such practices would be impossible under contemporary health and safety regulations on set. 

Out of all the notorious cases in film history of directors treating actors with deliberate harshness, coldness, and even cruelty in order to achieve some kind of desired performance effect, none are more infamous than that of Stanley Kubrick and Shelley Duvall on the set of "The Shining." Throughout the decades, there have been numerous reports and stories, ranging from the substantiated to the sensational, about how emotionally and physically demanding the role of Wendy Torrance was for Duvall. According to several accounts, even calibrating for Kubrick's typically unsparing perfectionism, he was especially exacting in his treatment of Duvall, demanding that she rise to a consistent level of emotional anguish that was painful to sustain, even isolating her from the rest of the cast and crew in order to add to Wendy's sense of alienation and despair.

The idea that the director and actress' relationship crossed over into outright emotional or professional abuse, however, is not universally agreed upon. Not only has the story about Kubrick shooting 127 takes of the baseball bat scene been debunked as a myth by biographer Lee Unkrich (via IndieWire), but Duvall herself has repeatedly gone on record stating that, while the shoot did take a toll on her mental health thanks to its long hours and heavy emotions, Kubrick was a warm and friendly filmmaker who maintained a productive artistic relationship with her, give or take some heated arguments.

It's widely known that Alfred Hitchcock was fond of maintaining cold, strict, somewhat patronizing working relationships with his performers. "Actors are cattle," he once infamously remarked to François Truffaut during their 1962 cycle of interviews (via The Guardian). But if there's one case in which the master of suspense's treatment of actors went beyond idiosyncratic grouchiness, it was with Tippi Hedren. Unlike Shelley Duvall on Stanley Kubrick, Hedren did state multiple times over the years that Hitchcock was emotionally and sexually abusive towards her. Even aside from the director's alleged sexual obsession with Hedren, the brutality she was openly subjected to on the set of "The Birds" boggles the mind.

The iconic 1963 horror film dangerously employed real birds in its various set pieces, ranging from crows to gulls to sparrows, and Hedren got the worst of it. In the film's scariest scene, her character, Melanie Daniels, enters an upstairs bedroom that turns out to be filled with birds that have broken in through the roof. The scene took a week to shoot, and although Hedren had been assured that mechanical birds would be used for it, she soon found herself having live, aggressive birds hurled at her for hours on end. Things got to the point where a bird pecked her cheek near her eye, sending her into a mental breakdown. A physician ordered a week of rest — and Hitchcock still attempted to overrule it.

Dealing with animals on movie sets can often be a daunting endeavor, especially in films which, like Robert Eggers' "The Witch," ask their furry cast members to turn in antagonistic or outright villainous performances. Even so, the havoc that Charlie the goat wreaked on the set of "The Witch" was just something else. A British landrace goat that was selected for having the most menacing Black Phillip-ian look to it, Charlie quickly proved to have just the right temperament for the role of the film's demonic killer beast.

As Eggers and actor Ralph Ineson revealed to The Hollywood Reporter, Charlie behaved defiantly throughout the shoot, furiously fretting about in scenes that required stillness and trying to go to sleep when they did want him to act aggressive. Ineson, whose surly family patriarch William has a particularly belligerent relationship with Black Phillip in the film, revealed that the animosity also extended to their offscreen dynamic: It was "hate at first sight," with Charlie insisting on attacking Ineson at every opportunity.

On the shoot's fourth day, Charlie gored Ineson and dislodged a tendon, forcing the human actor to complete the film on painkillers. After that, Eggers tried to replace Charlie with two different goat puppets, but neither was cutting it. Several dangerous scenes had to be excised, while at least one was accomplished with the use of a leash. Rebellious or not, the darn goat's performance was indispensable.

The thing about dangerous and excessive plays for authenticity in horror filmmaking is that, for audiences, it's often way too easy to brush off the underlying workplace safety concerns, so long as the end result is effective. Some of the older entries on this list are, in fact, instances of labor exploitation and mistreatment that couldn't and shouldn't fly in contemporary sets. No movie is worth that level of human suffering. But even if you're the type to excuse the occasional hazardous work environment as long as it contributes to a good cinematic result, there's just nothing that could justify what Sandra Peabody went through on the set of "The Last House on the Left."

Sure, Wes Craven's 1972 directorial debut wore its misogynistic violence and tastelessness on its sleeve, with scenes that were meant to be appalling, break taboos, sink to new depths of darkness in the genre, etc. But none of that should have had any bearing on the way Peabody's co-stars treated her. From Marc Sheffler threatening to push Peabody off a cliff if she didn't get a scene right, to David Hess threatening to assault her for real during the shooting of one of the film's many sexual assault sequences, the set of "The Last House on the Left" is — if those stories are true — a glaring example of chauvinistic abuse passed off as an acceptable catalyst for "realer" acting.