7 HORROR ROLES THAT REALLY MESSED WITH ACTORS’ HEADS

Stanley Kubrick’s highly controversial movie, A Clockwork Orange, is disturbing enough to the viewer, let alone to the actor who starred in it. For the famous brainwashing scene in the film, lead actor Malcolm McDowell allowed his eyes to be pinned open for every take. Unfortunately, McDowell didn’t leave unscathed: the physical torment caused him to suffer from temporary blindness and a scratched cornea. We imagine the psychological effects were even more painful than that.

As the child star in one of the most iconic horror movies of all time, Linda Blair has experienced lasting effects from The Exorcist. Blair admits that when filming the movie at 13 years old, she didn’t really know what was going on. To her, it was simply acting. The real trauma occurred after The Exorcist’s release in 1973, when everyone, media included, began to treat Blair like a possessed demon herself. To help lessen the blows of critical media, Blair was sent on a worldwide campaign to dispel rumors and set the record straight—an exhausting, draining feat for someone that age.

While The Blair Witch Project is a movie that’s probably laughed at more than it actually scares people, the disturbing ways in which the directors tormented and haunted the cast are scary enough on their own. Filmed over an eight-day camping trip (if you can call it that), there was little interaction between the cast and directors, aside from daily meetings to provide the actors with more supplies and instructions for where to go next. To authentically scare the cast, directors stalked the actors during the day, rattled their tents while they were sleeping at night, and intentionally gave them less food as the days progressed so that they became more and more angry and exhausted.

You might know Kyle Richards now as a real housewife of Beverly Hills, but before she was a TV star, she was a child actress in John Carpenter’s Halloween. After seeing the premiere of the movie, Richards was so terrified that she reportedly had to sleep with her mom until she was 15, always imagining someone hiding under her bed or behind the curtains, waiting to get her. Needless to say, Richards never acted in another horror film again. Unless you count her continued appearances on the actual horrorshow that is Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, that is.