Horror movies have the ability to scare and exhilarate us in equal measure. Whether it’s a jump scare that leaves your heart pounding or the sight of something so disturbing it’ll give you sleepless nights, horror’s ability to present us with the most depraved aspects of humanity is what makes the genre so captivating.
However, no matter how traumatic the things we are seeing on screen, we can rest easy in the knowledge that no one in these movies is actually being harmed or in distress. Or so we’d like to think…
Throughout the history of cinema, filmmakers and actors have attempted to push themselves to the absolute limit in order to realise their vision. When it comes to horror, that can often mean raising the bar too far, leaving cast members emotionally devastated and struggling in their lives away from cameras.
Here are 16 horror movies so scary that even the actors in them were traumatised.
Psycho (1960)
Speaking to The New York Times in 1996, Janet Leigh admitted that she “stopped taking showers” after being left disturbed by the iconic scene where her character is stabbed to death in the Bates Motel. She resorted to more drastic measures when staying somewhere that only had a shower. Leigh explained: “I make sure the doors and windows of the house are locked, and I leave the bathroom door open and shower curtain open. I’m always facing the door, watching, no matter where the shower head is.”
Midsommar (2019)
At least three members of the cast of Midsommar, Ari Aster’s Scandinavian pagan horror, have admitted to struggling psychologically after making the film. Lead star, Florence Pugh, who played Dani, told the Off Menu podcast in 2023 that she would put herself in “really s*** situations that other actors maybe don’t need to”, to play out the trauma that her character was going through. “I was putting things in my head that were just getting worse and more bleak. I think by the end, I had probably – most definitely – abused my own self in order to get that performance,” Pugh added.
Even supporting actors felt the brunt of the movie. Jack Reynor told Collider that he had to work on his mental health throughout the entire shoot. In addition, Will Poulter told Empire that he had, “terrible, terrible, full-on nightmares” when making the film, which caught him “massively off guard”.
Halloween (1978)
Kyle Richards was only nine years old when she starred in Halloween. Although making the film didn’t scare her, seeing the film as a youngster left a profound impact. Richards told the Hollywood Daily News in 2013: “I had no idea what I was in for. Seeing it for the first time all pieced together was a very, very different movie. It was just really scary, and I really did sleep with my mom until I was 15 years old after that. I was terrified.”
Possession (1981)
According to director Andrzej Żuławski, Isabelle Adjani, who won Best Actress at Cannes for her feverish performance in his intense Lovecraftian breakup movie, tried to kill herself after seeing the final cut. Speaking in a 2000 documentary about his career, the Polish director said: “I think I was responsible for that. I was the one to blame. If somebody plays in my film and then is going through something like that, that means I didn’t notice something.”
In 2023, while speaking to Interview magazine, Adjani said: “I remember – if you’ll allow me to offer a comparison from my own career and some situations with [the director] Andrzej Żuławski – there was something of great violence that I agreed to take on. But I’ve realised over the years that it’s something I could never accept again, and it’s part of everything that my subconscious has been swallowing and incubating.”
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The Birds (1963)
Tippi Hedren claims that she was tortured by actual birds that were trained to peck her in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic after the mechanical birds on set stopped working. Speaking to Vogue in 2016, she said: “I was never frightened, I was just overwhelmed and in some form of shock, and I just kept saying to myself over and over again, ‘I won’t let him break me.’” After Hitchcock finally called “cut”, Hedren admitted: “I just sat there on the floor, unable to move, and began sobbing from sheer exhaustion. Minutes passed before I looked up to discover that everyone had just left me there in the middle of that vast, silent soundstage, completely spent, empty, and alone.”
Hereditary (2018)
Director Ari Aster has a history of leaving his actors emotionally devastated after completing one of his films. Before Midsommar, he released Hereditary in 2018, which lead actor Alex Wolff believed left him with a type of PTSD. Speaking to Vice, he explained: “It’s hard to describe eloquently. It’s just a feeling. I don’t think you can go through something like this and not have some sort of PTSD afterwards. When I started talking about it, all these flashes with all this disturbing s*** I went through sorta came back in a flood. It kept me up at night to where I got into a habit of emotional masochism at that point of just trying to take in every negative feeling I could draw from.”
The Shining (1980)
Stanley Kubrick’s notorious treatment of Shelley Duvall on the set of The Shining heightened her hysterical performance, especially after being made to reshoot one scene a record 127 times. It caused severe side effects and reportedly left her dehydrated due to the amount of crying she was doing, and losing clumps of her hair. In the 2000 book The Complete Kubrick, Duvall says: “From May until October, I was really in and out of ill health because the stress of the role was so great. Stanley pushed me and prodded me further than I’ve ever been pushed before. It’s the most difficult role I’ve ever had to play.”
It Chapter Two (2019)
After starring in the sequel to the 2017 film, James McAvoy admitted that Bill Skarsgård’s performance as Pennywise was so scary it left him suffering from nightmares. The Scottish actor told PA: “The only one I can really remember is, I’m lying on my side in the bed and he was in bed with me. And he’s stroking my back gently and saying, ‘Wake up, James, wake up.’ And I was just terrified, pretending to be asleep. I just thought, I’ve got to pretend to be asleep, I’ve got to pretend to be asleep. I had lots of nightmares about Pennywise, but that’s the one specific one I can remember.”
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster both won Oscars for their performances in The Silence of the Lambs but the latter has since admitted that she was “petrified” of Hopkins’s turn as Hannibal Lecter. Speaking on The Graham Norton Show in 2016, Foster said: “The first day we had a reading […] and by the end of it I never wanted to talk to him again. I was petrified. We got to the end of the movie and really had never had a conversation. I avoided him, as best as I could.”
However, it would appear that the feeling was mutual, with Foster adding: “It was the last day and he came up to me. I sort of had a tear in my eye, I was like, ‘I was really scared of you,’ and he said, ‘I was scared of you!’”
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Despite The Texas Chainsaw Massacre being perceived as a gory film, the scariest moment in it actually involves no violence at all. Talking to Esquire in 2021, Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface, said that the dinner table scene, where Marilyn Burns is tormented by the film’s sadistic family, is “burned” into his memory.
He explained: “I think just because of the misery of it. At that point, we were really just on the verge of mental collapse. And Marilyn told me about how awful it was for her because she was terrified… just being tied to a chair and then having these men looming over her constantly, she said it was really unnerving. I think that whole scene was certainly the most intense part of the movie, and I think all of us were slightly insane by then.”
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Most of what made The Blair Witch Project one of the most successful films of 1999 was the genuine panic and sense of hopelessness that the actors managed to convey. According to the directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, most of the actors’ fear was genuine. Apart from actually getting lost in the woods, the stars were also stalked by Myrick and Sánchez, who even went so far as to rattle their tents at night. In one scene, Heather Donahue is heard yelling “What the f*** is that?” at something off-camera. Unbeknown to her, this was art director Ricardo Moreno, running alongside the actors wearing white long johns, white stockings, and white pantyhose over his head.
Alien (1979)
To have genuine reactions, Ridley Scott chose to keep the cast of Alien in the dark about what was about to transpire in the legendary scene where an alien bursts out of the chest of John Hurt. One of the realest responses came from Veronica Cartwright, who according to writer Ronald Shusett, “passed out” when being splattered with blood. Cartwright told Empire in 2009: “They have four cameras going. You see this thing start to come out, so we all get sucked in, we lean forward to check it out. They shout, ‘Cut!’ They cut John’s T-shirt a little more because it wasn’t going to burst through. Then they said, ‘Let’s start again.’ We all start leaning forward again and all of a sudden it comes out. I tell you, none of us expected it.”
Suspiria (2018)
Dakota Johnson has one way of dealing with the trauma of starring in horror films: therapy. After starring in Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 classic, about a covenant of witches who run a ballet school, she told Entertainment Weekly: “When you’re working sometimes with dark subject matter, it can stay with you, and then to talk to somebody really nice about it afterwards is a really nice way to move on from the project.”
Martyrs (2008)
Martyrs is a depraved and brutally violent French revenge movie that prompted walkouts when it premiered at Cannes. Speaking to Total Film in 2009, one of the film’s stars Mylène Jampanoï said the intensity of the film caused her to go back to her room every night and cry, “because I was so physically and psychologically tired”. She added: “All my scenes are violent. When I chose this movie, my agent told me maybe it was not a good choice as an actress. You should maybe start with a comedy! But the script was amazing, really amazing. I knew this would be a film that people would either love or hate.”
Poltergeist (1982)
The Steven Spielberg-produced film is potentially one of the most cursed productions ever, with off-camera murders and deaths creating stories far scarier than anything seen on screen. The uneasy tension on set contributed to JoBeth Williams, who plays the mother in the haunted house film, even managing to get spooked in her own home. During a Reddit AMA session in 2014, Williams explained: “Because we were supposed to be scared so much, I think everybody’s nerves were hypersensitive. I didn’t live in LA then, so I was in a rented apartment, and I began to notice that every night when I would come home from shooting, exhausted, fried, the pictures on the walls would be crooked. And I would straighten them.
“And the next day, I would come in, and the pictures would be crooked again. So that always made me feel a little nervous about the place I was staying. But I finally realised it was when I slammed the door closed to leave, that the pictures would shift because I slammed the door!”
The Amityville Horror (2005)
Ryan Reynolds’s usual happy-go-lucky persona was put to the test when filming the Amityville Horror remake in 2005. Not only did the body of a dead fisherman wash up on a lake near the house where he was filming, but Reynolds also claimed that strange things began happening to the cast and crew at night. The Canadian actor told MovieWeb: “I think a lot of people make that stuff up to sell their movie, but there was some weird stuff that happened. A lot of the crew were waking up at 3:15 in the morning, which was when all these atrocities in the house took place each time. I think it was a subconscious thing. You read the script and suddenly pop awake at 3:15 in the morning.”