Horror Roles That Really Messed Up The Actors' Heads

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

Have you ever watched a horror movie and wondered how these actors get through such terrifying, disturbing roles? While many actors are highly skilled at guarding their personal and emotional well-being while playing haunting roles, others are not so lucky. From working with abusive directors, to method acting gone wrong, here are some actors who took on horror roles that really messed up their minds.

Despite getting mixed reviews, Bryan Bertino's low budget home invasion horror The Strangers made a hefty profit at the box office in 2008, raking in $82 million on a budget of just $9 million. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman star as a couple whose remote getaway becomes a nightmare after three torturous strangers in masks show up. Variety's Dennis Harvey was one of the critics who praised the movie, lauding the two leads for "credibly registering every hue of panic."

According to Tyler, her reactions were credible because she was legitimately terrified. When NewsBlaze asked her if she was actually scared on set, she replied: "Oh yeah. I mean, all the time. Absolutely. That's what is so real about The Strangers. Like, you'd be in bed at night trying to relax, and all of a sudden you hear a noise and you go, 'What was that!' And you wonder, are you brave enough to go check or not. Imagine if you went to look, and there's a person in a mask standing in your living room, with a butcher knife!"

Actress Laura Margolis (who plays the "Pin-Up Girl" intruder) revealed on the Blu-ray extras that she'd been told Tyler wanted to feel genuine fear during their scenes together. "I got strict instructions not to let Liv see me in my mask before we shot," she said (via ComicBook.com). "She didn't want to have to fake it, and so it was my responsibility to really scare her."

The real-life ghost-hunting history of Ed and Lorraine Warren is freaky enough to put anyone on edge, but Vera Farmiga knew very little of her character's counterpart before signing the dotted line on The Conjuring and receiving her first paranormal encounter as a welcome gift. The actress told Cinema Blend that during her first round of research into Warren's work she had a brush with the beyond after she hung up the phone with director James Wan and opened her laptop to find "three digital claw marks, from the upper right diagonal to the lower left."

Those marks would make a second unsettling showing in Farmiga's Conjuring experience the day after she finished shooting the first film and returned to her home in New York. She woke up to find a similar set of markings on her thigh. "It was these three, very distinct, what looks like claw marks, that long nails or long fingertips ... could make," she explained. Even though she chose not to "give into the fear" of the moment, she said "there's clear evidence of some strangeness that's occurred. My husband did not do that to me. I did not scratch some mosquito bite. It's inexplicable."

The chest-bursting scene from Alien ranks among the most iconic moments in all of sci-fi film history, and perhaps that's partly because the cast involved in the scene really didn't know what was about to happen to them on the set and were genuinely disturbed by it. Director Ridley Scott explained his reason for letting the creature's big reveal happen in real-time during the shoot, saying, "The reactions were going to be the most difficult thing. If an actor is just acting terrified, you can't get the genuine look of raw, animal fear."

Indeed, his approach to eliciting sincere scares worked. As actress Veronica Cartwright later remembered, "You see this thing start to come out, so we all get sucked in, we lean forward to check it out ... all of a sudden it comes out. I tell you, none of us expected it. It came out and twisted round." Sigourney Weaver, too, got lost in the moment, saying, "All I could think of was John [Hurt]. I wasn't even thinking that we were making a movie." Cartwright is credited with having the most intense reaction of all because, per writer Ronald Shusett, "when the blood hit her, she passed out."

Stanley Kubrick absolutely wrecked the psyche of actress Shelley Duvall during production of his adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining. Among the most harrowing tales from the storied set of the acclaimed pic was his consistent mistreatment of Duvall, including telling others on set not to sympathize with her when she was upset and dogging her work. The film was shot in chronological sequence, so as the viewer watches her character unravel onscreen, it's worth noting that it was also happening in her real life.

In The Complete Kubrick, Duvall detailed the personal torments she experienced, saying, "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." She reportedly was so worked up during the shoot that she had to keep bottles of water nearby to stay hydrated through all of the crying that she did during production, and she even presented the director with clumps of her hair to show just how unwell she was at the time. It didn't help matters that Kubrick made Duvall do her baseball bat scene a record-setting 127 times.

Co-star Jack Nicholson later credited her part as "the toughest job that any actor I've seen had because 40 percent of that picture, she's hysterical," but he also thinks there was some useful method to Kubrick's madness. "He beat Shelley into that performance," he said. "If that was me, I don't know what I would do. I do not. I still wonder. You're supposed to be able to do it, but for four months? But she did. She's brilliant in the movie."

James Brolin was initially hesitant to sign onto the 1979 adaptation of Jay Anson's true story-inspired novel The Amityville Horror because when he was courted for the job, there was no script to review. But he gave the book a look-see and got so frightened by what happened to him mid-read that he accepted the gig right then and there.

Brolin explained to The A.V. Club, "I was reading this novel at night and it's two in the morning. Well, I would hang my pants on the door of the bedroom, I'd throw them over the top corner of the main door coming into the bedroom, and all of a sudden the pants fell off the door and onto the floor. How I didn't hit my head on the ceiling, I have no idea, because I was at a scary part of this book, and so it surprised me that I started laughing after I recovered and said, I've got to do this movie!'"

Another iconic scene from Wes Craven's A Nightmare of Elm Street depicts the violent death of Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss). Tina first encounters disfigured child killer Freddy Krueger during the opening scene of the movie, in which we see Krueger assembling his deadly glove before chasing the teen around a grimy boiler room. "We filmed the opening scene at this old prison called the Lincoln Heights Jail," Wyss told Rolling Stone. "It was so creepy and filled with such bad energy that it was terrifying just to be there."

The place was apparently so spooky that nobody would go anywhere alone, but the scariest part of all for Wyss was the unpredictability of Robert Englund (Krueger). "It totally was scary," she recalled. "The scene where he's coming up behind me, he would do it differently every take, so that I never knew when he was going to come up to me." The boiler room chase turns out to have been a dream, but as Tina would soon find out, that's where Krueger gets you.

The following night Krueger returns and practically guts Tina, who bleeds profusely as she seemingly floats towards the bedroom ceiling. "The first spin around it felt like I was falling, even though I was on the floor," she said, explaining how they built a rotating set. "Then I felt that if I wasn't falling, everything was going to fall on me. It was terrible. We had to stop. The terror in my death scene was 75 percent real."

If you've seen The Silence of the Lambs, you'll understand why Anthony Hopkins made Jodie Foster feel uneasy. He gave an iconic performance as captured serial killer Hannibal Lecter, some of it from behind a creepy leather mask. Hopkins was apparently just as intimidating before he was dressed as Lecter, however. He and Foster met for a full read through of the movie beforehand, and she was so scared afterwards that she didn't speak to him off-camera for the rest of the shoot.

"I never spoke to him, he was scary," she admitted during an appearance on The Graham Norton Show. "The first day we had a reading [...] and by the end of it I never wanted to talk to him again. I was petrified." Foster kept this up right through to the last day of the shoot, going out of her way to avoid Hopkins. "We got to the end of the movie and really had never had a conversation. I avoided him, as best as I could."

Hopkins went on to win Best Actor for his performance, but it turns out he wasn't anywhere near as calm and collected as he made Lecter appear. "It was the last day and he came up to me," Foster said. "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!'"

Jeffrey Dean Morgan might be playing a savage, bat-slinging brute of the zombie apocalypse in The Walking Dead, but he got pretty worked up over his work in The Possession. He told io9 that he and his co-stars were so freaked out by the real story of the dybbuk box that they made sure not to take it lightly during filming. "I'm a skeptic, look, I'm not going to lie," he explained. "That being said, there was some weird goings on on set. Lots of light bulbs exploding. Just overall kind of creepiness ... 'Don't mock the box' was sort of the mantra that we lived by while we were filming this."

He purposefully steered clear of the real box that was the subject of the 1994 Los Angeles Times article that inspired the film because, as he said, "I didn't want to get scared. It might have freaked me out a little bit too much, to be honest. Somebody wanted to bring the box to the set, the real box. I was adamantly against it. If you go and you look at what has happened to people that have had contact with an actual dybbuk box, it's not good stuff ... Why risk that?"

Tobe Hooper can be a cruel, cruel dude. Not only did The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's writer-director frighten people out of their seats when he unleashed his skin-mask-wearing maniac Leatherface (played by Gunnar Hansen in the original) into the cinematic world, but he also scared the daylights out of his own cast by concealing the character's revolting look from them until it was action time.

Hooper withheld the ultra creepy appearance of Leatherface from his stars until the cameras started rolling for the sake of drumming up some hyperrealistic shrieks, and it worked. Hansen told Esquire that the torment of poor Sally (Marilyn Burns) at the dinner table was as brutal for the actress portraying her as the character itself. "The whole dinner scene is burned in my 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 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." Burns herself later told Hansen, "I thought you were really going to hurt me. You couldn't see through your stupid mask."

Long before Sam Raimi redefined the superhero movie with 2002's Spider-Man, he made a little video nasty by the name of The Evil Dead. In the winter of 1979, the director headed into the Tennessee woodlands with a small cast that included former schoolmate Ellen Sandweiss, who starred in a few of Raimi's early Super 8 films. She took part in The Evil Dead's infamous tree rape scene, though she didn't know just how disturbing an experience it would be when she signed up.

"That scene initially was supposed to just be a 'tree attack' scene, the rape part kind of evolved as we were shooting it," she told Love-It-Loud. "It was pretty grueling, shooting in the cold, in the middle of the night, getting scraped up by trees, not a whole lot of fun. People were quite shocked when they saw it, but not quite as shocked as I was." Sandweiss wasn't kidding about people being shocked by the movie: The Evil Dead was banned in the UK, and didn't pass British censors until 2000.

"I think the film remained a cause for debate because it was so over the top and unrelenting in its violence," she continued. "Of course, like any other notoriety, it only served to make the film more popular. In terms of my career, it did put me on the cult film map, even though it was as the 'tree-rape chick.' In this business, you take what you can get!"

Mia Farrow went through quite a few traumatizing experiences while working on Roman Polanski's American film debut, Rosemary's Baby. A strict vegetarian, Farrow was asked by Polanski if she wouldn't mind eating raw chicken liver for a scene. Little did she know she would be forced to consume it over and over again for different takes. On top of that, Farrow was served divorce papers from her then-husband, Frank Sinatra, on-set and in front the entire cast and crew. If that's not traumatizing, we're not sure what is.

While filming The Birds, Hitchcock tormented his star actress, Tippi Hedren, both on- and off-set through manipulation, sexual slurs, and obsessive behaviors. The tipping point for Hedren was when Hitchcock lied about the use of real birds in a particular scene. Instead of the mechanical birds used in the rest of the film, Hedrin was duped into acting with live ones that were hurled at her over a week of filming. She left the set bruised, bloodied, and emotionally scarred.

Here's another incident from a classic Hitchcock horror film. Janet Leigh was never quite the same after starring as Marion Crane in Psycho. Traumatized after watching herself in the famous shower scene, Leigh became too afraid to take showers and from that point forward, and only took baths. Regarded by many as one of the darkest horror films in history, Psycho affected not only Leigh but others involved with the film as well, Hitchcock included.