10 Movies Scenes That Genuinely Terrified Actors

When you’re making one of finest films of all time and a landmark in cinema history, how fake a horse head prop can you really get away with? It’s not a question we often ask ourselves, and it’s also not one which veteran director Francis Ford Coppola had to consider when shooting his epic mob movie The Godfather.

That’s because Coppola used a genuine horse’s head for the scene, a fact which he for whatever reason forgot to inform the actor who encountered the severed body part in bed. After using a relatively realistic prop in rehearsals and ensuring his star was adequately comfortable with the scene, Coppola switched it out for a bona fide horse head when the time came to shoot the sequence. So all that horrified screaming you hear in the scene?

Yeah, upon a re-watch that’s actually less “Mobster realizes the implication of this flamboyant threat”, and more “poor unsuspecting actor tries to show up to work and finds out what a decapitated horse looks like up close and personal.”