10 Horror Movies That Nearly Killed Actors

The Poltergeist series is mired with tragedy due to a multitude of unfortunate events that caused the movies to be labelled as "cursed". The most tragic of these include the untimely deaths of two of its stars, Dominique Dunne (22) and Heather O'Rourke (12). However, while those awful losses happened off-set, this one nearly came at the hands of the film's freakiest prop.

In one of horror's scariest scenes, the young Robbie Freeling's creepy clown doll gets possessed and attempts to kill him. To shoot this, a mechanical version of the toy was rigged, with its arm tightening around actor Oliver Robbins' neck. Yeah, you can probably tell where this is going.

During filming, the poor youngster ended up getting choked for real by the mechanism. What's worse is that his desperate cries that he couldn't breathe were mistaken for improv, leading to the stunt continuing until his face turned purple. Thankfully, Steven Spielberg (who wrote and possibly directed the film, depending on who you ask) saved the kid in time.

What makes all this even crazier is that this is the second Tobe Hooper movie to appear. It seems that nearly killing Gunnar Hansen on the set of Texas Chainsaw Massacre just wasn't enough for him!