22 Horror Movie Facts - mental_floss List Show Ep. 334 | Mental Floss

Hello, I'm Cat. Just kidding. I was Craig all along

Welcome to the salon. This is Mental Floss Video, and did you know that Steven Spielberg owned a DVD of paranormal activity that he thought was haunted

He tried to watch the movie at home, then the doors to his bedroom locked on their own, according to Spielberg

So he brought the DVD back to DreamWorks Studios in a trash bag. Paranormal's director Oren Peli later commented

So the whole story about how the doors to his bedroom got locked from the inside, personally I believe it

It's not something the marketing department just came up with before releasing the movie. And that's the first of many fun facts for behind the scenes of horror movies that I'm going to share with you today

Because it's Halloween time. Oh my god, how did the cat mask get back on the shelf

Oh no! It's believed that the first ever horror movie was a silent French film from the 1890s called Les Manoirs du Diable, or The Haunted Castle

And it was a three minute short. In I Know What You Did Last Summer, the characters visit a place called Dawson's Beach

This is an inside joke, as the film was written by Kevin Williamson, the creator of another 90's favorite, Dawson's Creek, which some would also call a horror show

Williamson also wrote Scream, starring Drew Barrymore. She was originally cast as Sidney

Prescott, the lead, before deciding that she'd prefer to play Casey, the character in the opening scene Scream was almost titled Scary Movie by the way Harvey Weinstein suggested the title Scream after hearing the Michael Jackson song of the same name and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was originally titled Head Cheese Speaking of early titles the original title of the movie Halloween was The Babysitter Murders

It took only ten days to write the screenplay and twenty days to shoot the film. That's exactly how long it takes to make a mental floss video. And it's equally as scary

Joel Cohen of the Cohen brothers got his big break working as an assistant editor for Sam Raimi on The Evil Dead

The 2013 film The Conjuring is based on a supposedly real experience of two paranormal investigators

Ed and Lorraine Warren. They actually approached director James Wan about making the movie

The scary doll Annabelle from the film and spin-off is a Raggedy Ann doll in real life

As am I. Stephen King wrote a screenplay for The Shining, but Stanley Kubrick refused to even read it

Instead, he collaborated with author Diane Johnson on the script. Which backs up my theory

that Stanley Kubrick can't read. Another horror movie based on a book, Rosemary's Baby. In fact, producer William Castle bought

the movie rights before the book was even published because he got his hands on a smuggled galley copy

play started out as a satire rather than a true horror film. Writer Don Mancini has said

I wanted to write a dark satire about how advertising and marketing affected children

My father worked in advertising. I was always fascinated about it. It was interesting to

see how the Cabbage Patch doll phase was affecting all of America. I'm not sure if he laughed

or not In Alfred Hitchcock Psycho Marion drives a 1954 Ford sedan It believed that this car was a prop borrowed from the set of Leave It to Beaver They took it from Beaver Speaking of Psycho in the original Carry the high school is Bates High referencing the Norman Bates character The American version of The Grudge was directed by Takashi Shimizu who directed the original

Japanese version. He didn't speak any English, so he had to communicate with Sarah Michelle Gellar using

things like body language and tone. Gellar later explained, You'd think it'd be difficult when you don't have the words to rely on, but you wind up

connecting on this different level. So many people believed that The Blair Witch Project was a real documentary that it even

impacted actors' real lives. According to actress Heather Donahue, When Blair Witch first came out, my mom kept getting sympathy cards. It was all part of

their marketing scheme. People thought I was dead. Chris Cooper had a small part in the ring as a criminal who was being interviewed by

Naomi Watts' character Rachel. He only appeared in the first and last scenes, and test audiences

were confused as to why he disappeared during the entire movie, so he was cut out

And killed! No, he wasn't killed. Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street got his name because director Wes Craven

rest in peace, knew a bully named Freddy in elementary school. Craven also gave Kruger his signature sweater for a reason. He had read a scientific study

claiming those shades of red and green side by side make it hard for the human eye to distinguish

them. So his outfit is unnerving to look at. For the part of Damien in 1976's The Omen, there were two long days of casting in which

four kids auditioned every ten minutes. Harvey Stevens got the role while acting out Damien's church-induced tantrum. Director

Richard Donner told him, I gonna fight with you Even though I say stop don stop After a certain point Stevens family had to burst into the room and pull him off Donner Similarly over 1 girls auditioned for the role of Reagan McNeil in The Exorcist according to director William Friedkin He said it was important to find

a young girl who could play the role well, but also not be seriously affected by filming

such a scary movie. I was seriously affected by watching it. His concern makes sense because the set was said to be haunted. The legend goes that nine

people died and there were numerous other injuries while the film was in production, plus a huge fire broke out that destroyed the set

And because it's Halloween, let's get spooky and finish up with a few other horror movie sets that were said to be haunted

Let's get spooky. Ryan Reynolds, who starred in the Amityville Horror remake, has said that during production

he consistently woke up in the middle of the night at the same time his character often does

Even creepier, a body washed up on the shore right where the film was to begin shooting

Finally, I returned to the salon to tell you that a camera broke on the set of the remake of The Omen

According to the director John Moore, there was an error message, error 666. Ooh

But a camera technician informed them that there was no such thing as error 666

What the f**k