R-Rated Horror Roles That Kids Never Should Have Played

We've all seen our fair share of horror movies with kids in them. Sometimes they're creepy and sometimes they're innocent victims but they're always just a little bit out of place in such dark films. After all, children are young and innocent, and our instinct is to protect them from violence and things that go bump in the night. To be fair, most horror films do a great job of shielding their child actors from the scarier elements of the narrative, which often means filming their reaction shots separately so that they don't have to look at gruesome makeup or actively participate in age-inappropriate set pieces, or giving them only an abbreviated version of the story so they don't quite know what their character is experiencing.

Still, some horror movies, particularly ones that have received an R-rating, contain content that makes it hard to support hiring a kid to take part. At the end of the day, there's only so much you can do to hide the reality of the film from them; much of it will still get through, making an impact on impressionable young actors who may not realize until much later how much of an effect it really had on them. While we're fairly confident that most of these kids haven't been psychologically scarred by their experiences, these are just a few horror movie roles that were maybe not in the best interests of their young actors.

In the 1970s, horror films involving exorcisms and demonic possession were all the rage, and "The Possession of Joel Delaney" ranked as a lesser-known entry into this subgenre. Shirley MacLaine stars as Norah, a woman with two children who begins to become concerned that there's something wrong with her younger brother Joel (Perry King), whom she essentially raised after the death of their mother. Their relationship feels vaguely incestuous, but honestly, that's the least of Joel's problems. It seems that he has been possessed by the spirit of serial killer Tonio Peréz, and that his increasingly strange behavior is a result of Tonio's homicidal tendencies. Still, Norah doesn't believe it — until it's too late.

David Elliott plays Norah's son Peter, and although most of the film requires nothing more from him than traditional kid fare, there's one harrowing scene that no child ever should have been expected to take part in. When Joel holds the family hostage, he tortures each of them, forcing Peter's sister to eat dog food and instructing Peter to take off his clothes. Elliott is shown naked in this scene for a few moments, an exploitative and frankly distressing choice that never would have flown if this film had been made a decade or two later.

There's a disturbing hint of truth to "The Black Phone." Unlike many other horror films, which contain supernatural elements or franchised villains who have become so famous that they barely even seem to exist within the confines of their movies anymore, it focuses on a small-town menace with horrifying consequences. This community in the 1970s has been besieged by a swath of missing children, the victims of a mysterious figure called "The Grabber." 

He initially seems like a phantom, just a boogeyman invented to scare the kids. But then Finney (Mason Thames) finds himself trapped in the Grabber's basement, his only connection coming from a phone that allows him to hear words of encouragement from the Grabber's previous victims. The real-life component of "The Black Phone" — the rare but terrifying specter of child kidnappings — plus the sexual abuse aspect of the Grabber's crimes that the film alludes to combine to make this heavy material for a child actor.

The members of the self-styled Losers Club in "IT" contend with a pretty significant string of bad luck. First of all, they live in Derry, Maine, a town plagued by a terrifying monster that kills and eats children, which, you know, isn't great. Together, the group of friends must fight to kill IT once and for all, so that it won't keep coming back every few decades to feed, and corrupt the town in the meantime. All of the kids have a rough go of it, but what puts Beverly Marsh — the group's sole girl — in her own territory, making the role especially tough for a young actress like Sophia Lillis? 

Some of it boils down to how much the script centers on the character's budding sexuality. More than one of the Losers has a crush on Beverly, and there's an uncomfortable subplot that suggests even her own father is keenly aware of her progression towards womanhood, and blames her for it. The fact that she's the one to wind up covered in blood in a bathroom? Not a coincidence. We're just thankful that the "IT" films left out the weird-beyond-words scene from the book where the kids engage in a pre-teen orgy to fight Pennywise the Dancing Clown. (Yes, really.)

To be fair, Jacob Tremblay is no stranger to disturbing roles. His breakthrough performance in "Room," after all, came when he was just nine years old, playing a child raised in captivity by his mother (Brie Larson), a woman abducted and kept in a tiny shed for years. But he's harrowing in an entirely different way in "Doctor Sleep," the sequel to Stephen King's "The Shining," and he figures prominently in arguably the film's most gruesome scene. Walking home from a baseball game, he crosses paths with the True Knot, who ritualistically murder individuals they find who possess "the Shine" in order to absorb their essence. 

Although his murder scene isn't visually graphic, the violence and pain in Tremblay's screams are genuinely unnerving, so much so that it freaked out the other actors on set. When discussing the scene with Cinema Blend, he described his process, saying, "It was just very real for me. I did the scene, and as soon as it was over obviously I didn't want to linger on those emotions for too long, because maybe I'd start to freak myself out a little bit." Obviously, the actor tapped into something dark to perform the scene, which is a lot to ask of a 12-year-old.

We could have easily put the 1997 version of "Funny Games" here but technically that film opened "NR" (Not Rated), so it doesn't quite fit the bill. We'll settle instead for the English language shot-for-shot remake that Michael Haneke directed 10 years later, which is just as disturbing as the original. It captures the horrors of a particularly brutal home invasion, in which would-be robbers hold Georgie (Devon Gearhart) and his parents hostage. 

The so-called funny games they're subjected to are not so much "funny ha-ha," and more sadistic and terrifying. One involves Georgie having his leg broken, and then being suffocated until his mother agrees to strip naked for the two intruders. Haneke seems to have made the film as a commentary on the role of violence in mainstream cinema, and how easily it becomes sanitized, but critics weren't universally convinced. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle called it "a vile cinematic exercise," while Richard Roeper said it was "grotesque and appalling."

Of all the kids who've appeared in horror films, Linda Blair in "The Exorcist" ranks among the most impressive and most controversial. When the film opened in 1973, it was met with immediate outrage from audiences, with many disturbed by its gruesome and sacrilegious content, particularly a scene where 12-year-old Regan — possessed by a demon — masturbates with a crucifix. An older actress, Eileen Dietz, performed that scene and other sequences the studio considered too inappropriate for Blair.

Though somewhat shielded from the darkest material, that doesn't mean that Blair emerged unscathed from "The Exorcist." During the scenes in which Regan writhes in her bed, Blair was attached to a harness that allowed her to move unnaturally. In one take, "The lacing came loose," Blair discussed on "Cursed Films." "I'm crying, I'm screaming, they think I'm acting up a storm. It fractured my lower spine." For the most part, she harbors mixed feelings about her time on the film. As reported by Telegraph, she mentions that she wouldn't have allowed her child to take the role. She also recalls feeling pressured to perform as much of the unsavory content as possible, saying, "Billy Friedkin came to me before we were filming and said, 'If you do not do all of this film, the film will be a joke.'"

And that's to say nothing of going on press tours and discussing the nuance of the film's religious subtext. "I'd be thrust in front of hundreds of people I often couldn't understand who were putting their faith into my hands," she said. "It was horrible."