The Scariest Thing About Scary Movies Isn't What You Think
Uh oh! The call is most definitely always coming from inside the house
Welcome to another day hanging out in the coconut tree.
This week the RNC is in my city, I was laid off, and I watched Longlegs.
The horrors persist, but so do the wombo combo indie-thriller big-screen bangers you could argue comprise the best **original** work **consistently** produced in Hollywood since the early 2010s.
Instead of falling deeper into a pit of IRL unemployment scaries, or political scaries, how about we shuffle the convo over to dramatized film scaries. Specifically, horror movies. Specifically specifically, the toll it takes to act in horror movies, and what this says about workplaces, workers’ rights, audience entitlement, the world.
Ha! I feel better already!
Longlegs is the latest example of horror receiving elite indie studio attention bow tied in clever af marketing.
Prior to the release of Oz Perkins’ highly anticipated summer scary, the movie’s trailer went mega viral. The public was then peppered with a pre-box office marketing campaign that included, among other things, billboards displaying an actual phone number you could actually call to hear an oh-so-creepy-crawly serial killer’s recording. Or a viral website designed as an entirely real-life lookalike to immerse you in the detailed cold cases making up the chilling backbone of Longlegs’ plot, as if you’d stumbled across an unsolved murders blog during a middle school sleepover circa 2005.
Yet in what could be considered its most inspired move, Longlegs’ production team released footage of lead actress Maika Monroe as she encounters fellow actor Nicolas Cage in character, full makeup and wardrobe, for the first time while filming.
**Spoiler alert of a smallish sort in just this lone paragraph but honey you’ve been warned okay?!?!** Cage’s face as Longlegs do be looking like Jigsaw’s mask but if it were made from a splattered, still-half-frozen Marie Callender chicken pot pie. I, too, would be on edge if forced to make prolonged eye contact with that, and would be unable to stomach dough-wrapped comfort dinners for quite some time.
The average human heart rate runs between 60-100 beats per minute (BPMs). In the footage, adorned with a small taped monitor, Monroe’s heart taps in at a whopping 170 BMPs.
Houston, I don’t think we’re acting anymore…
Our brains are simply not very good at distinguishing perceived threats from real threats. Which, ya know, is why answering emails is so damn taxing.
Other notable times actors had a scary good time on set, emphasis on scary:
Alex Wolff, Hereditary (2018). Not only has Wolff commented on his weight loss and near-constant bouts of sickness while filming the runaway 2018 horror hit. The actor also sought treatment for PTSD post production, citing memory loss to severe flashbacks to trouble sleeping. During filming, the then 18-year old also dislocated his jaw shooting a scene where his characters smashes his head, repeatedly, into a school desk. Someone give that boy a raise!
Shelley Duvall, The Shining (1980). Duvall’s legendary on-screen hysteria as fighting-for-her-life Wendy Torrance bled off-screen. The actress was treated for dehydration due to constant panic attacks and crying while on set. Duvall lost her hair and experienced ongoing health issues post wrap-up — all against the backdrop of the psychological abuse it’s now widely acknowledged director Stanley Kubrick put Duvall and her castmates through to make the film.
The cast of Alien (1979) in that one you-probably-already-know-what-I’m-talking-about scene. Apparently, director Ridley Scott thought it would be fun for the whole family to scrub the body horror details behind what’s now considered one of the Alien franchise’s most iconic scenes. Most of the cast was kept in the dark as to how a certain alien spawn would be making its grand entrance. (Hint hint, it involves a human chest and a lot of blood. Like, a lot.) The cast’s reactions were not staged. Veronica Cartwright fainted.
Real human skeletons used in key scenes with actress JoBeth Williams, in 1982’s Poltergeist.
Bill Skarsgard’s ongoing trouble shaking off his role as Pennywise the Clown in the 2017 It remake. Skarsgard is on record explaining how playing Pennywise has taken a rather permanent toll, changed his approach to choosing work, and left him with recurring nightmares.
Tippi Hedren collapsing on the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 The Birds. Hitchcock apparently lied to — or strategically omitted, depending on the account or your personal permissiveness toward language — Hedren prior to filming, telling her the on-set birds would be mechanical only to insist on using live, agitated creatures trained to literally chase, peck, and claw at his lead.
Another Hitchcock (ha ha!) but now Psycho (1960). Apparently making Janet Leigh shoot the infamous shower murder scene for a week straight — a third of the movie’s entire filming schedule — did no favors for Leigh’s mental health, to the point she developed a lifelong shower phobia. Occupational hazard!
It’s worth noting many of these instances were director initiated. Male director initiated, often toward or surrounding female leads.
It’s also worth noting most of these instances pre-date the 21st century, before tightened set standards, safety protocols, and union-fought actor contract protections.
And also also finally worth noting — Maika Monroe seems fine. Yay! Here’s her absolutely slaying some film promo pics. Martini glass chic!!
By the way — don’t let any of the above mental hand wringing fall into the wrong circles. The last thing we need at our current juncture is another slimy major studio-funded spinoff manned by techertainment bros coked up on AI-ing Hollywood, all pulling a faux ethics card on why this rationalizes using AI-generated actors. I.e., why pay real performers, who are so silly and complicated and, ugh, emotional! AI replicate away the pain!
Welp, now I’m feeling down and even a bit guilty for watching and loving these movies, so thanks a lot for that
You as an individual theater goer or movie streamer or even horror fan aficionado are not the cause of institutional set failings, or workplace abuse glossed over in defense of the auteur. Just as you alone are not responsible for fast fashion, or CAFOs, or housing crises, or summers getting hotter, or children mining cobalt for smartphones, or so many more real-life horrors, or or or or.
But you already know this. Everyone I think already knows this. It’s not ego shielding, either. You really can’t make a huge dent acting solo against societal problems, and you can’t function with this level of internalized guilt.
You’re also smart enough to know that ain’t an excuse. To be human is to learn, negotiate, relearn. To adapt to the plot twists.
Though with art consumption, things get complicated. Brandon Taylor of Sweater Weather recently waded through the muck of this very topic better than I ever could while also heart-baring himself across it with a deep personal tie. It’s truly one of the most moving pieces I’ve ever read on this platform. And while Taylor’s microscope fixes on the current Alice Munro revelations, the discourse speaks widely on what to do and how to feel about art, any art, of any medium, that we collectively learn after-the-fact came from someone or something directly culpable in great suffering.
What happened on many of these horror sets should make you pause. They shouldn’t make you paralyzed. What actors go through here blurs lines between performance and reactivity, consent and exploitation. And sometimes, as in the cases of Hitchcock and Kubrick, just call it what it is: abuse.
Outside of abuse — which should be penalized and prevented, no hand wringing, no shit — I don’t have an answer for this actor entanglement. I only know we, as the audience consumer, should step up to the task of sorting through any new information learned about movies with honesty and efficacy over defensive ego, and keep what abhors us, literally and figuratively, at bay within our personal circles, to protect our personal ripples.
The reminder bears repeating because we’re resting atop a political fulcrum where everyone seems consumed with either virtue signaling or virtue signaling how much they don’t virtue signal. With that comes this tension of the “perfect clever consumption and opinion cycle” at all levels and at all times for all audiences, always, even within ourselves. Even here on Substack. (Ya definitely here on Substack.)
The byproduct backfires. We end up feeling small and tired, and we turn cynically paralyzed. We go numb, we don’t look deeper anymore. Looking deeper makes us feel sad. But this negligence ends up disconnecting us from ourselves, much less others, making it impossible to then draw any map toward reengaging actively and meaningfully again with our small worlds.
It’s gonna be okay, babe. (Usually.) These times are fraught, and perfect consumption impossible. But because it’s so fraught, it’s generally good praxis to look shit up deeper sometimes, to not always be passive. Doing so helps you cognitively connect the dots while reminding yourself you’re not perfect, this world isn’t perfect, there aren’t many great answers, but you still should look it all in the eye. You have to care about (sometimes) being better.
For instance, just asking “Hmm…now why exactly has the horror genre seen such a craftsman resurgence in the past decade?” can not only lead you to sitting, reading, and writing about fascinating albeit disturbing layers to film history and culture, but it gives context for the greater social anxiety zeitgeists du jour that horror especially subverts, one or two or three of which really touch home, which then presses you to navigate important realities, better understand your beliefs and your limits, and link yourself to the larger actionable whole. All that context — all that cognitive connecting the dots — makes you sharper, wiser, hopefully more nuanced, hopefully more empathetic.
And hear me out. Isn’t that the scariest thought of all — your world with no more empathy?
[Rolls end credits to ominous, unsettling, possibly even confusing post-modern music.]
[[Plays this clip 1,000 more times until my eyes bleed, my ears shrivel, and I’m in an early grave.]]
Jack! Thank you!! Ya wow that’s gotta be one of the coolest descriptions of my writing I’ve heard. Truly.
And GREAT question, thank you for noting/asking! You’re actually spot on — it was a nod toward both! I wanted to play with the common horror movie trope, and use it to wink at the larger idea most of us are prey to OUR biases and social conditionings and just sheer humanity. Very very VERY rarely does that make us an actual monster, it just makes us human. But worth knowing and acknowledging it, as sometimes it’s healthy to mistrust and re-investigate your instincts. (Just practice it to a healthy degree, not doing so so much you drive yourself crazy.) So so cool you picked up on that.
Some of the things I love about your writing are your careful attention to the aesthetics of the language and structure you use - your commitment to your subject, in other words, on its own terms - and your consistent effort to link the parts of things to the whole and to suggest actions derived from the message. Not enough to discuss scary film history, one has to discern the relationship between that film history and the zeitgeists of the day. And organize.
But speaking of horror, sorry you got laid off! Good luck with the job hunt (?).
And can I ask you one question? Your little blurb ("uh oh! The call is most definitely always coming from inside the house"): was that an intentional reference to the intimate nature of horror (it starts inside us)? or (just?) a play on the movie trope where you always get the call before you learn that you're the prey of something else's hunt? Works either way.