Horror films injuries that went too far – amputated limb, star branded and tragic death

It might take a lot to spook a hardened horror fan as long as you keep in mind that what’s happening on the screen isn’t real.

But some productions have crossed the barrier from fiction to fact, and it’s ended up with some gory real life accidents and injuries for the cast and crew involved in making movies like The Mummy, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Resident Evil.

From accidental deaths on-set to stars being branded with real hot irons to ensure authenticity in the final project, some things are just too gory to think about too closely. For the actors involved, some stunts have ended in life-long conditions – while others sadly didn’t survive.

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It’s not just the stunt actors who succumb to these injuries, either – major Hollywood stars like Brendan Fraser, Brad Pitt and Jake Gyllenhaal have all suffered for their craft.

Actor ‘killed for 18 seconds’

While filming The Mummy back in 1999, Brendan Fraser might have won international acclaim and helped the movie smash the box office – it banked more than $416million worldwide – but he also brought his career to a standstill. The Oscar-winner explained that he did his own stunts for the film, which resulted in him “dying” on-set for several seconds.

He told CBS News: “They killed me for 18 seconds. I was hanging from the noose standing on a board. Take one, and [director] Steve [Sommers] said, ‘The noose doesn’t match the stunt guy’s. Can we bring up the tension a little bit, and we’ll have it’.

“They did the take and the camera was on a spin that goes 180-degrees and it shows the prisoners shouting, and then comes down on me at the end of the noose. I figured, ‘I’ll get oxygen and hold my breath,’ and I was up on my toes and something went wrong- and the next thing I knew, I was waking up.”

He admitted in 2018 that he was “trying too hard” while doing all his own stunts, admitting to GQ: “By the time I did the third Mummy picture in China I was put together with tape and ice – just, like, really nerdy and fetish’y about ice packs. Screw-cap ice packs and downhill-mountain-biking pads, ’cause they’re small and light and they can fit under your clothes. I was building an exoskeleton for myself daily.”

It resulted in multiple surgeries for Fraser, including a partial knee replacement, back surgeries, vocal cord repair and a laminectomy.

Fetish model ‘branded’

For the low-budget horror Skinned Deep, released in 2004, director Gabe Bartalos wanted to take things a step further with his opening scene.

The scene features someone’s arm being branded with the letters S and D, to fit in with the movie’s opening titles. But instead of going down the route of special effects, Bartalos hunted down a fetish model online to undergo the actual scarification of the letters on their arm.

According to IMDb, he placed an ad on the site which simply read “human canvas wanted”.

Star sliced

Filming the Texas Chainsaw Massacre had its drawbacks, especially for the cast. Nearly every actor suffered an injury, with Edwin Neal having his face burned by hot asphalt, while Paul Partain’s death scene involved director Tobe Hooper and make-up artist Dottie Pearl squirting Karo syrup into the air to attract flesh-eating mosquitos.

Texas Monthly writer John Bloom claims: “No-one was beaten, cut, and bruised more than Burns. By the end of production, her screams were real, as she’d been poked, prodded, bound, dragged through rooms, jerked around, chased through cocklebur underbrush, jabbed with a stick, forced to skid on her knees in take after take, pounded on the head with a rubber hammer.”

Actor Jim Siedow told the publication: “I was afraid to hit her at first. I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t hurt her. But they kept telling me it looked fake and I needed to really hit her. It took me several tries, but by the end of it, I was really hitting her. It actually got to be kinda fun.”

Actor Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface, ended up slicing open Burns’ finger when the fake knife they were using malfunctioned, with biographer Joseph Lanza writing: “The prop knife they used, which contained a tube of fake blood that Hansen was to squeeze onto Burns’ finger, had malfunctioned.

“They tried many takes, and finally, Hansen grew so impatient that he surreptitiously sliced her finger for real before exposing her to Dugan’s saliva.” Dugan didn’t realise what had happened until years later, confessing: “I was actually sucking on her blood, which is kind of erotic really.” Burns, however, was “furious”.

‘Extreme pain every day’

Not only did Resident Evil: The Final Chapter end in tragedy for one crew member, it also saw one star’s arm amputated after a horrific accident. During the filming of a motorcycle chase, stunt double Olivia Jackson was left in a medically induced coma.

She accidentally collided with the arm of a camera during filming, suffering cerebral trauma, a degloved face, a severed neck artery and a paralysed arm. Five nerves were torn out of her spinal cord, and she also suffered broken ribs and a shattered scapula. In 2016, her paralysed left arm had to be amputated, along with a torn thumb.

Olivia later ditched her stunt career and now works as a meditation teacher – even embracing her injuries with a ‘cut here’ tattoo over her left stump. Sadly, she confessed to a fan: “I’m in extreme pain every day. It never stops. I’ve developed ways to be able to live with it easier.”

Crushed to death

During the making of that same Resident Evil instalment, crew member Ricardo Cornelius was crushed to death when a Hummer H1 slid off a platform he was operating. Just 34 years old, the star died in hospital after the heavy vehicle landed on him.

His widow Shafiefa told IOL at the time: “At the hospital, doctors said they had to take him into theatre as soon as he arrived. His heart stopped and they were fighting for his life but managed to revive him again. The doctors said his lungs were completely flat and he was bleeding a lot.

“He was unconscious and he was already on life support. I held his hand and I told him not to leave us because we need him and he is a strong man. I spoke to him but the doctors said he didn’t know what was going on around him. We were with him for about an hour, then he died.”

Plane crash

Though it managed to fly mostly under the radar, 2004 pirate horror CrossBones has a tragic backstory. Cinematographer Neal Fredericks was flying in a Cessna aircraft to get shots off the Florida coast when the plane crashed.

Though the film director and two other crew members escaped the wreckage along with the pilot of the plane, Fredericks became trapped in his harness and drowned in the ocean. He was 35 years old.

44 stitches

Jake Gyllenhaal was up for risking it all when he filmed Nightcrawler in 2014, losing almost 30lbs to appear gaunt for his role as Lou Bloom. But things went even further when he decided to improvise a mirror-smashing scene in the bathroom.

It wasn’t planned – and so the mirror was totally real – slicing up the star’s hand. He was rushed to hospital for an eye-watering 44 stitches. The injury later had to be hidden, explaining on YouTube show Hot Ones: “In the opening of that movie, my hands are behind my back. The opening two or three scenes. We shot those scenes last and because I had a huge cast on my arm, we’re hiding it throughout the opening of the film.”

Hospital dash

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While filming 1995 horror Se7en with director David Fincher, Brad Pitt really did end up injuring himself. The star plays Detective Mills in the flick, and while chasing after a suspect, falls from a fire escape. His character spends the rest of the film wearing a cast in one arm – which Pitt needed in real life.

The actor hit the arm through a car windshield and had to be rushed in for surgery, but to avoid any delays to filming, the injury was just written into the script. He severed a tendon in his hand and, according to some sources, broke his arm.

Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk