There’s one iconic horror film that was even too scary for The Shining author Stephen King.
Despite being a giant in the world of terrifying fans, one 90s film left him too frightened to open his eyes the whole time – and for good reason. Perhaps that’s because he tried to watch it while “doped up” in hospital, as he admitted to Eli Roth on his podcast History of Horror.
He was handed The Blair Witch Project on a VHS tape from his son, and said he would give it a go. He confessed he “turned it off halfway through”, as it was just “too freaky”. He said: “The first time I saw it, I was in the hospital and I was doped up. My son brought a VHS tape of it and he said, ‘You gotta watch this.’ Halfway through it I said, ‘Turn it off, it’s too freaky.’”
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The star confessed in the author’s note of his book Danse Macabre: “One thing about Blair Witch: the damn thing looks real. Another thing about Blair Witch: the damn thing feels real.
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“And because it does, it’s like the worst nightmare you ever had, the one you woke from gasping and crying with relief because you thought you were buried alive and it turned out the cat jumped up on your bed and went to sleep on your chest.”
The 1999 release follows three film students who vanish when they head into a Maryland forest to film a documentary about the local legend of the Blair Witch – and only their footage is left behind for anyone to piece together what happened.
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Part of the reason the film feels so real is that the actors, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams – who all went by their real names in the film – improvised everything. A 35-page script was provided, but most of it was plot-related, while the actors came up with the dialogue themselves.
Even their IMDb pages listed the stars as “deceased” as a viral marketing campaign featuring their missing posters set the movie up to become a modern classic. Heather told The Guardian: “The shoot took eight days and was a 24/7 operation. It wasn’t like a normal film: the actors would work the cameras, filming each other all the time. Using GPS, we directed them to locations marked with flags or milk crates, where they’d leave their footage and pick up food and our directing notes.”
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The trio were told what was generally going to happen, but producers also liked to mess with them at night time, shaking their tents and sending the sounds of creepy children echoing around the darkness. The shoot cost around $35,000 in total, and even the local police were convinced the teens had disappeared.
The movie birthed a 2000 sequel that flopped, and a second sequel in 2016, following relatives of Heather trying to figure out just what happened to her during that fateful trip.
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
