1. The Entire Movie - The Evil Dead (1981)
The Evil Dead was the movie that brought Sam Raimi to the attention of rich people who could give him money to make more expensive movies. It's also one of the greatest horror debuts in the history of the medium, and one which has inspired countless copycats, parodies, two sequels of its own, and a recent remake. The plot, which certainly sounds cliché by today's standards, concerns a group of teenagers who visit a cabin in the woods for a wild weekend of sex and shenanigans, and mistakenly unleash a bunch of evil spirits, all of whom set out to murder them (don't you hate it when that happens?). The flick had an incredibly low budget, so Raimi had to skimp out on things like "safety measures" and "tact", and proceeded to torture his cast to get the results he wanted. Seriously.
The Evil Dead was pretty much created over a year of relentless pain and suffering, at the expense of the actors who dumbly agreed to help Raimi achieve his dream. Which basically meant that all that smashing glass and fake blood was really flying at the people who were, uh, "pretending" to be terrified: they were rarely warned about what was going to happen, and most of the casts' reactions to the events in
The Evil Dead are completely real. Bruce Campbell, who plays iconic hero Ash over the course of the entire
Dead trilogy, sprained his ankle whilst this mania was going on - an ankle which Raimi would continually poke with a stick while the rest of the movie was being shot, to keep up continuity. And then there's the scene where Campbell was attacked with a real knife, and was legitimately made to dodge out of its way, or else meet death. Certainly this dedication paid off, as the movie became a big hit (relative to its budget, anyway), and is considered to be a cult classic today. Though we're not sure what happened to most of the cast members, save for Bruce Campbell, who we're told survived these events. It's rumoured that if you visit the set of the movie today, you can hear a voice in the wind saying: "
No... more... enforced... method... acting."
Which examples of enforced method acting have we missed? Let us know in the comments section below.