The Curse Of Bridge Hollow's Marlon Wayans Was Terrified Of The Skeletons On Set
While Netflix's horror-comedy "The Curse of Bridge Hollow" is a family-friendly movie, it still features more than a couple majorly creepy characters across its slew of Halloween decorations come to life. From groaning zombies to killer clowns to fire-breathing jack-o'-lanterns, it ticks almost every horrific Halloween staple on the list and then some. As such, the father-daughter duo of Sydney (Priah Ferguson) and Howard (Marlon Wayans) end up having their work cut for them as they try to rescue their town from supernatural purgatory.
Of course, per his background as a science teacher, Howard spends a good portion of the movie stubbornly refusing to admit that the monsters are real — even when they're chasing him down through his school's hallways. But while the learned academic initially prides himself on being a proud skeptic of all things spooky, Wayans himself admitted that he was absolutely terrified of one of the film's abominable creations while filming on set: the football-gear-sporting skeletons.
The skeletons spooked Wayans
Partway through "The Curse of Bridge Hollow," Sydney and Howard's Halloween battle is taken to their own home, as numerous living skeletons crash through their windows. Howard gets some standout moments here, slicing through several of the creatures with a chainsaw and even wielding a few bones as nunchucks. However, if it seems to viewers that Marlon Wayans looks a little extra-terrified as he's enacting carnage on the skeletons, that's because he actually is.
The skeletons frightened Wayans so much that his fear bled into his actual performance during the movie. In an interview between Screen Rant and some of the cast of "The Curse of Bridge Hollow," Wayans spoke about the undead creatures. "I honestly thought the skeletons were scary," Wayans said. "That's why I was chopping them in half with such force. I really wanted them dead."
Wayans' fear is a testament to the film's character designs and special effects. As "The Curse of Bridge Hollow" director Jeff Wadlow told Nightmarish Conjurings, getting the monsters' looks right was a priority for the team and resulted in them working with four separate design houses. "We all have so many different images that come to mind when you think of Halloween, clowns, bats, zombies, this entire menagerie of creatures," Wadlow said. "So, the opportunity to work with all these different creature houses and design them was really exciting to me because we embraced an approach where we didn't hire just one [design] house."