10 Movies Scenes That Genuinely Terrified Actors

Everyone is at least a little unsettled by Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece The Shining. The director did admittedly opt for a more subtly unsettling and darkly comic tone when he adapted Stephen Kings smash hit novel in 1980, but it’s hard to deny that the atmosphere of dread pervading the film is unsettling and unrelenting.

The director went to further extremes than anyone else on this list to ensure that, and it’s fair to say the cast were terrorised during the making of the film. Sure a lifetime in therapy is pretty brutal, but if you’re looking to evoke the feeling of David Lynch’s feature debut Eraserhead as Kubrick was, it’s also an easy shortcut to get your cast on board.

Kubrick singled out star Shelley Duvall in particular, putting her and Jack Nicholson through the ringer during a scene in which he confronts her with an axe. Kubrick made the actors do 127 takes of the scene in order to capture the correct sense of hysteria, and the floods of tears Duvall is reduced to are unfortunately very much the product of real life terror.