Artisan Entertainment
1. Over 500 gallons of fake blood were apparently used in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
2. Director Wes Craven chose the colour red and green for Freddy’s top after reading that the colour combination is the most clashing to the human eye.
3. And test makeup for Freddy Krueger had him looking pretty different – the iconic outfit was swapped for a paperboy hat and a sleeveless shirt.
4. Bette Davis did her own makeup for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? for as she didn’t believe a professional would agree to put that look on her.
5. The Thing was initially banned in Finland.
6. Dan Lloyd, who was five when he played Danny Torrence in The Shining, didn’t know he was making a horror movie and thought he was acting in a drama. He was shielded from the scarier things on set. A year after its release, he was shown a heavily edited, kid-friendly version of it which was about ten minutes long.
7. Linda Blair received threats from people who believed The Exorcist
“glorified Satan”. Warner Brothers arranged for bodyguards to protect the actress for six months after the film’s release.
8. And seven years after its release, videos of the film were withdrawn from shelves in the UK for eleven years, after being deemed unsuitable for home viewing in case younger audiences watched it. It continued to play in cinemas sometimes.
9. The cast of The Blair Witch Project stayed in character throughout filming, but whenever they wanted to break character they would use the safe word “taco” with one another.
10. The script had no dialogue so the cast improvised their lines, this was in part to make it seem more natural and less like something fictional.
11. Director Katherine Bigalow had wanted Near Dark to be a straight-up Western, but as Westerns weren’t very commercially successful at the time the decision was made to fuse genres.
12. After showing Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) to test audiences, the studio asked for most of the comedy to be cut out so that it would be a straight-up horror film.
13. The other mask considered for the character of Michael Myers in Halloween was a clown mask.
14. And when the movie was still a work in progress, the script title was The Babysitter Murders. Not as iconic sounding IMO.
15. Because it was set in autumn but made in spring, paper leaves had to be painted to give the impression of it being fall.
Universal Pictures
16. Jamie Lee Curtis was invited to audition for the role of Reagan in The Exorcist, but her mother wouldn’t allow it.
17. In total, around 25,000 birds were used for The Birds.
18. And there was meant to be a final scene showing the Golden Gate bridge covered in birds, but it was too expensive to do.
19. The original opening for Get Out was going to feature a white family in their house having dinner and talking about Disneyland, with the incident happening outside their house without them realising.
20. And the hypnosis scene was inspired by Silence of the Lambs.
21. Boris Karloff, who played Frankstein’s monster in the first Frankenstein, was 5″11 and so had to wear platform boots to appear taller. They supposedly weighed around 13 pounds each.
22. The hiss noise that Elsa Lanchester makes in Bride of Frankenstein was inspired by the sounds swans make at Regents Park in London.
23. The base of operations for Evil Dead 2 was a defunct junior high school – in fact the production office was a library.
24. Kong’s roars in the original King Kong movie were a mix of lion and tiger roars played backwards.
25. Chris Martin appears as a background zombie in Shaun of the Dead.
26. Tilda Swinton was considered for the role of Pennywise in the 2017 version of It.
Orion Pictures
27. Ellen Page was meant to play Christine in Drag Me to Hell but had to pull out because of scheduling conflicts.
28. Anthony Hopkins only blinks once in The Silence of the Lambs.
29. Before the script was sent to Anthony Hopkins, Sean Connery was offered the lead role but turned it down, apparently being disgusted by it.
30. And Jodie Foster wasn’t the first choice for her character either – it was offered to Michelle Pfeiffer who turned it down for being so dark.
31. The two leads hardly spoke to each other throughout shooting because of the jail cell and glass partitions where most of Lecter’s scenes were.
32. And when he first got sent the script, Hopkins assumed it was a children’s movie because of the title.
33. John Krasinski put on a motion-capture suit and played the monsters in some scenes of A Quiet Place.
34. The farmhouse in Annabelle: Creation was also used in Westworld .
35. Even though the original Annabelle doll was a Raggedy Ann one, this was changed in the film in part to look creepier, but also because it would be hard to persuade a company to let them use their doll for the film.
36. Essie Davis lost her voice for three whole days after her 11-second scream in The Babadook.