Horror Movies That Nearly Killed People

Stephen King once wrote that the "last reason for reading horror: it's a rehearsal for death. It's a way to get ready." I agree with that statement and believe it applies to watching horror, as well as reading it. Sure, there's something to be said about how watching people scream and die in terrible ways probably satisfies the morbid curiosity that resides in the more primordial parts of our brains. But King's quote serves as a more profound (and socially acceptable) explanation for our attraction to the stories about fictional characters shuffling off this mortal coil, and how they allow us to come into contact with the great beyond.

From a safe distance, that is.

However, for an unlucky number of actors and film crew members, death got a little too close during the making of several horror movies, whether it was freak accidents, production team negligence, or tyrannical directors pushing their crew to extremes. We all know that real artists must suffer for their craft, but having a brush with death during the creative process is a little much. And so, let's take a look at some horror movies that nearly killed people.

2022's "Scream" — the fifth installment in the beloved slasher franchise — marks the first one helmed by someone other than the legendary Wes Craven, who passed away in 2015. However, the film still managed to pay tribute to what came before it as well as introduce new characters and plotlines. One of the fresh faces to debut in the series was actress Melissa Barrera, who played Sam Carpenter, the biological daughter of Billy Loomis from the original film. Here, she's been suffering from hallucinations of her late murderous father as someone else dons the Ghostface mask to target a new generation of teenagers.

Barrera almost became a victim in real life. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, the actress said that the production used a number of knives, including both rubber and real knives, depending on the needs of a given scene. Unfortunately, while shooting a scene that utilized a real knife, the gloves that the Ghostface actor wore were slippery, causing it to fly out of their hand and the window behind Barrera, just barely missing her. Despite the danger, she was more worried about the film's stunt coordinator, saying, "But poor Keith [Ward], our stunt guy, was mortified. I felt so bad for him. I was like, 'I'm fine!' And they were like, 'Yeah, but it could've gone really, really wrong. Imagine if you would've gotten stabbed with a flying knife!'"

Eli Roth's "The Green Inferno" lovingly pays tribute to the horde of drive-in cannibal movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s, like "Cannibal Holocaust," "Cannibal Ferox," and "Eaten Alive!" In this film, college freshman Justine joins a student activist group on a trip to the Amazon to protect a local village in danger of being displaced by a petrochemical company and prevent the foliage from destruction. However, during their trip, the group's plane crashes and a cannibal tribe shoots the survivors with poison darts and takes them via canoe to their village, where further horrors await.

As treacherous as the canoe scene played out in the film, it was actually far more harrowing in real life. Lorenza Izzo, who plays Justine, almost drowned while shooting the sequence. Roth told Yahoo that, "we had many close calls, like when Lorenza Izzo almost drowned in the river during a take — and yes, we used it in the film. We had a safe word for her to yell, but it was so loud [that when] she was screaming it at the top of her lungs, none of us heard her." Because of how real Izzo's reaction was to almost dying, could anyone blame horror maestro Roth for incorporating it into the finished product?

"The Exorcist" has held onto its reputation as one of the scariest movies ever made for 50 years, and for good reason. Director William Friedkin and screenwriter William Peter Blatty (who adapted his own novel) crafted such a harrowing depiction of a demonically possessed girl that it still manages to terrify audiences today. Beyond the shock value, the film boasts an amazingly talented cast in the form of Linda Blair, Jason Miller, Max von Sydow, and Ellen Burstyn, who provide dramatic heft rarely seen in the horror genre.

Still, it wasn't easy bringing "The Exorcist" to life, as it put much of the cast and crew in danger. Burstyn endured a life-threatening back injury that she has had ever since. In an interview with HuffPost, the actress recounted how she experienced considerable pain during the scene when her possessed daughter hits her so hard that she flies across the room. Burstyn told Friedkin that the man operating the cable tied to her was pulling her too hard. Friedkin responded that the shot needed to look real, to which she said, "'I know it has to look real, but I'm telling you, I could get hurt.' And so he said, 'ok, don't pull her so hard.' But then I'm not sure that he didn't cancel that behind my back because the guy smashed me into the floor." Despite the injury, though, Burstyn still considered Friedkin a genius and a friend until his death in 2023.

"Ghostland" (also known as "Incident in a Ghostland") opens with a woman named Colleen as she takes her two teenage daughters — Beth and Vera — to the house they inherited from a recently deceased relative. But while settling into their new home, the three females are attacked and sexually assaulted by two mysterious assailants, known only as the Fat Man and the Candy Truck Woman. Colleen kills them, but they are left with the scars of that horrible night for the rest of their lives. Years later, an adult Beth is called back to the old house by her sister, who suffers recurring visions of that traumatic event, and it isn't long before Beth experiences bizarre hallucinations herself.

The film's depictions of brutal physical and sexual violence certainly aren't for the faint-hearted, but the shooting of it took an even bigger toll on actress Taylor Hickson, who played Young Vera. Hickson endured a gruesome facial injury while filming a scene that required her to repeatedly pound on a glass door that eventually shattered. She fell through it, greatly cutting her face to the point of requiring around 70 stitches. The actress told Deadline that, "The crafts services lady held my face together with napkins in her hands. She went through so many napkins, there was so much blood." Hickson claimed that the producer and director told her that the stunt was completely safe, prompting her to file a lawsuit against the film's production company, Incident Productions.

Like Steven Spielberg's other big 1982 hit, "E.T. the Extraterrestrial," "Poltergeist" follows a sweet suburban family that deals with an otherworldly event. However, unlike "E.T.," this film took audiences into a world of terror populated by a large hungry tree, a killer clown doll, and corpses exploding from the ground, among many other horrors. The Freeling family's young daughter, Carol Anne, has been communicating with spirits through television sets, and it isn't long before a gateway to a dimension filled with restless and malevolent entities opens up and snatches her. This, as well as the increasingly threatening happenings in the house, prompt the family to reach out to paranormal investigators for help.

The aforementioned killer clown doll delivers some of the film's most memorable moments, giving plenty of us (this writer included) many sleepless nights as children. However, the person it likely terrified the most was actor Oliver Robins, who played Robbie, the clown's main victim. For the scene when the doll attacks him, a mechanical version was built that had a fake arm that actually wrapped itself around Robins' neck. Only, the filmmakers underestimated the mechanism's strength, and Robins began to choke during shooting. Spielberg and director Tobe Hooper thought that the actor was just ad-libbing as part of his performance until they soon realized that he wasn't acting. Luckily, Spielberg rushed to pry the doll's arm off Robins before it strangled him.

The fourth installment in the beloved series created by legendary horror director John Carpenter saw "The Shape" return after his absence in "Halloween III: Season of the Witch." While hardly anyone considers the film a classic, retrospective reviews note the film's surprisingly tense atmosphere, and it has since gained a bit of a cult following. "Halloween 4" takes place 10 years after the events of the first two films in the series, as Michael Myers awakens from his coma to wreak havoc on Haddonfield to target his niece, the young Jamie Lloyd.

One standout sequence sees Michael chase Jamie and her older foster sister Rachel through a large house to its roof. In reality, a fake roof was built, but because it was shot outside in March at night in Utah, the tiles were especially slippery, posing a real threat to the actors. Ellie Cornell, who played Rachel, was the main victim; during filming, she slipped and got a large scratch from an exposed staple. She stated in "Back to the Basics: The Making of 'Halloween 4'" that luckily, "I didn't bleed out. There weren't intestines showing," She said. "It was not that – you know. It was just a surface wound. But I think the set medic went bonkers just because we had more to shoot. So they patched me up, and we went back to work."