5 Terrifying Things That Happened Behind the Scenes of Horror Movies

Released in 1976, The Omen was a terrifying movie that made us fear the name “Damien” because of the little boy who is actually the antichrist. The movie has some scary moments, but perhaps the scariest happened on set when one of the designers, John Richardson was in a car crash with his girlfriend.

Richardson survived but only to witness his girlfriend getting decapitated in front of him. But that’s not all, some dogs that were in the film went berserk one day and started to attack the crew. During the first day on set, another car accident occurred and crew members were injured.

Also, Gregory Peck, who played the lead was almost killed when his flight crashed in a storm; luckily, Peck didn’t board that plane.

The son of Bruce Lee, Brandon Lee, was the star in The Crow, which became a cult classic after it was released in 1994. Even though the movie put Brandon Lee on the map, the actor, aged just 28, was killed on set. Lee was filming a scene and was supposed to get shot with dummy rounds, however, the crew made their own by removing gunpowder from real bullets. They didn’t completely remove the primer and when the gun went off during filming, Lee was shot with the same force of a normal bullet and died from his injury several hours later.

If you’ve seen the Poltergeist movies, you definitely remember the unsettling and shocking scenes, however, even more terrifying things happened during filming.

One of the actresses, JoBeth Williams, claimed that every time she returned home from the set, all the photos in her home were mysteriously bent or crooked. The crew felt a weird energy on the set, and one of the actors wanted to purify the set from dark spirits. There was one scene in which a prop clown was supposed to strangle Oliver Robins, but the prop got jammed and almost choked the actor to death before the crew intervened.

The saddest thing about this movie is that Heather O’Rourke, the girl who had the role of Carol Anne, died from a misdiagnosed condition when she was 12. Also, Dominique Dunne, who played Dana Freeling, was strangled outside her house by her ex-boyfriend and died after 19 days of being on life support.

Shortly before the filming of this legendary horror movie, the shooting was held back because a mysterious fire burned down the set. It was later determined that the fire started when a pigeon got tangled up in some wiring, however, the strange thing is that one room was completely unharmed.

The room actually belonged to Regan, the girl who gets possessed in the movie. The actress who played Regan’s mother injured her back when filming started when some rigging failed to work in a scene in which her possessed daughter throws her in the air.

Since the tape was rolling at the time when the actress got injured, the director decided to use that take in the final cut and the screams in the scene are actual screams from the actress at the time of her injury.

At the premiere of the movie, lightning struck a church from the 16th century that was located right across the theatre, and the cross dropped down from the church. And perhaps the most terrifying thing is that two actors, Vasiliki Maliaros and Jack MacGowran, died after the filming was completed and the two characters that they portrayed died in the movie as well.

Rosemary’s Baby is one of Polanski’s scariest movies and it portrays a pregnant woman who thinks that something diabolical is happening to her child. After the movie’s release, William Castle, the producer, received some death threats and a letter which told him that he would die from a slow illness.

Shortly after receiving the letter, the producer had to be hospitalized and doctors had to cure his illness many times. In one instance, the hospital crew overheard that he shouted “put down the knife!” towards Rosemary.

The movie’s composer went into a coma after falling off a cliff and woke up when the theme “Rosemary’s Lullaby” was played to him, however, he did not survive.