Horror movies are meant to be scary for the people who watch them - not those who make them - but as we'll see today that's not always the case.
Over the years, countless famous horror movie sets including The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, and The Omen have been plagued by unexplained deaths, disasters, and accidents. Some people have even claimed that these sets were cursed because of the dark themes explored in the films.
While many of these incidents could only be explained by paranormal activity, others occurred due to lack of safety regulations - something we hope not to see happening again in the future.
Today, we'll be looking at a few of our all-time favorite scary movies and find out what other creepy stuff was happening behind-the-scenes. Get ready for real skeletons, raging lions, radios that turn themselves on, and possibly even a ghostly encounter or two!
The Shining took more than a year to film and it wasn't always the nicest place to be, thanks to the obsessive nature of director Stanley Kubrick. But the set was also battered by unexplained events, the biggest of which was a fire that destroyed two sounds stages worth millions of dollars.
The sequel to The Conjuring seemed to be just as spooky to work on as the first. Actors and crew members reported seeing curtains move without assistance on the set and hearing hammering sounds coming from underneath the sound stage. The child actors were particularly freaked out over this possible supernatural activity, as one would expect.
During the production of The Exorcist, a massive fire ravaged the MacNeil home set. There was only one room that was left untouched and that, eerily, was the bedroom where the exorcism scenes took place. Ellen Burstyn, who played Chris MacNeil, also suffered a permanent back injury during one of the struggle scenes.
The Crow seems like a movie that was cursed from the start. Onset injuries were commonplace and included electrocutions, stab wounds and burns. Of course, the worst of these accidents involved lead actor Brandon Lee who lost his life when he was shot with the fragment of a bullet that had remained behind in a prop gun.
While shooting one of the many underwater action scenes for The Abyss, director James Cameron became so engrossed in his work that he almost ran out of oxygen. In his quest to get a shot just right he let his reserves run too low and it nearly cost him his life.
Considering that there were over 150 lions, tigers, and other animals on the set of Roar, it's no wonder so many of the actors, including Melanie Griffith, were hurt during the production. The young Griffith needed 50 stitches to close the wounds she received during a run-in with one lion.
Rosemary's Baby is a horror film that's stood the test of time, but for producer William Castle the movie was a nightmare to make. He received hate mail and death threats constantly and ended up in the hospital with kidney stones where he hallucinated scenes from the film. Poor guy.
Poltergeist actress Diane Freeling thought that she was spending her days in a swimming pool full of plastic skeletons, but the truth was that they were anything but fake. It turned out to be cheaper to simply use real skeletons instead of rubber ones so that's what the production did. Yeah, that's not scary at all, right?
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The makers of The Innkeepers decided to shoot the film at an allegedly haunted hotel, so they weren't too surprised when strange things started to happen. "Lights have turned off and on by themselves in my room. My phone rang and no one was on the line, which the hotel staff says happens all the time," director Ti West said.
While researching for her role as Lorraine Warren in The Conjuring, actress Vera Farmiga had something unexplained and very creepy happen to her. She took a break from her laptop and when she returned she found three claw marks on her screen. Despite this spooky start, she decided to continue with the project.
There are few things scarier than a film set without proper safety precautions. Back in the early 80's, the crew of Twilight Zone: The Movie were scarred for life after they witnessed a terrible accident involving two illegally-hired child actors and a helicopter. Sadly, this tragic accident was entirely preventable.
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Making a movie like The Exorcism of Emily Rose must be scary enough, so imagine if radios started turning on by themselves on set, too! According to lead actress Jennifer Carpenter, that's exactly what happened. "The only time it scared me was once, because it was really loud and it was Pearl Jams 'Alive,'" she said.
Although they declined to use the original dybbuk box in the film, that didn't stop things from getting weird on the set of The Possession. A few crew members even reported the prop boxes catching on fire. "There was some weird goings on on set. Lots of light bulbs exploding," actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan explained. "Just overall kind of creepiness."
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The filming of Annabelle was so plagued by eerie events that when it came time to make the sequel (Annabelle Comes Home)the producers decided to take extra precautions. A priest was called in to bless the set with holy water, sanctify the artifact room, and pray with the actors.
The Omen is one movie set you can be glad you never had to work on. It's been named by many as the most cursed film set of all time and with good reason, because at least five people associated with the movie died during the production, including an animal handler who was killed by a tiger.
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15 Films Sets That Were As Scary As The Movies | TheThings - TheThings
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Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero