10 Horror Movie Secrets You Didn’t Know
Witches for hire! Websites for murderers! Upside down sets! Unexpected tarantulas!
Sometimes horror filmmakers need to employ some trade secrets in order to creep out discerning moviegoers. There's a million and one ways that the purveyors of gory shocks have used clandestine techniques to spook film fans, and their ingenuity has evolved alongside the medium of cinema itself over the decades.
These secrets range from Jaws director Stephen Spielberg shooting the infamous severed head discovery sequence in a friend's pool shortly before the movie hit theatres, through to filmmakers ensuring that their stars don't interact with the actor who will play their killer - a technique utilised by the makers of everything from the Scream series to 2007's Rear Window "homage" Disturbia.
With this cinematic sleight of hand in mind, this list is here to bring you the little-known filmmaking secrets which you never before realised contributed to the genre's greatest hits. From the infamous films of slasher cinema icon Wes Craven, through to more recent horror classics like The Ring, the one thing all these horrors have in common is bizarre behind the scenes secrets that you never would have guessed.
10. The Ring - The Cast’s Shadows
There's a lot to be afraid of in Gore Verbinski's The Ring, not least the spate of lesser rip-offs and embarrassing sequels that this terrifying original spawned. Adapted from Hideo Nakata's 1998 original, Ringu, this movie sparked the Hollywood obsession with J-horror remakes for good reason, as it managed to make the Japanese original even scarier in translation.
One spooky detail of the movie that few viewers notice the first time around, though, is the fact that no one in The Ring's cast has a shadow.
In the movie, that is. Pretty sure the actors all cast shadows in reality.
Throughout the film, the cast are carefully lit so as to cast no shadows in most shots, an unusual piece of meticulous cinematography which was a conscious decision on the part of the film's creative team. The filmmakers explained that this tiny, almost impossible-to-pinpoint detail adds a deeply creepy air of surreal wrong-ness to the flick’s look, one which makes the entire story feel weightless and dreamlike.