Do actors and directors of bloody horror movies sleep well at night?

I would think so, because unlike the idiot public they know it’s all make believe.

Good question. I often wonder what twisted shit Steven King thinks about as he’s falling asleep!

C’mon, @SQUEEKY2. Do you really think everyone is THAT stupid?

The way I read it, he didn’t say everyone was that stupid. He just referred to “the idiot public” which doesn’t include everyone.

I’ve heard some actors talk about having been upset, usually when a director doesn’t tell them something is going to happen, in order to get a more natural horror reaction from them. (e.g. in Alien)

But I doubt the effect lasts very long for most of them.

As someone who’s played and written a lot of game scenes with violent and horror-worthy content, I would say for me that the reverse is pretty true. It’s a game, and thinking about such subjects tends to erode the horror effect that people have who don’t think about them or experience them regularly. Especially in one’s own work.

The successful ones do.

You have no idea how corny and janky everything looks before colour grading, editing, and adding sound and music. Nothing there to cause nightmares.

If they do its because there minds are still creating the next horror story.

This is the perfect assignment for a film reporter. Ask horror filmmakers about their experiences. Would be very interested in reading it since I’m planning to write and shoot a micro-budget creepy indie movie.

It’s their job and they do it well, so they have no reason to not sleep well

Movies are NOT always shot i sequence order. Scenes are shot in order of the director’s preference & they are edited into the appropriate sequence. Therefore, the actor may not know how their acting that day will be used to create the movie, so they might not understand the full impact of the horror they provided on certain days.

I know it’s NOT a horror movie; but in the movie Bohemian Rhapsody the very first day of filming was the scene from Live Aid which was at the END of the movie. The beginning of the movie wasn’t filmed until near the end of all filming. Then the movie was cut & pasted as needed to provide the full effect. I’ve heard actors say the same about love stories or romantic scenes. I assume that filming horror stories would use the same techniques.

Yes, yes they do!

Why not? With the money they make what worries would they have? Anyway it’s only entertainment.

If they couldn’t they wouldn’t have been involved in horror movies in the first place :)

Besides, as someone who is currently writing a fiction with some rather disturbing scenes, I always feel as if the effect of what I write doesn’t have much impact on me. I can think about really crazy stuff and just go “nah, still too bland, need some more spice”. I never knew what I write is disturbing until a friend of mine proofread for me and said that out loud to me.

@LadyMarissa has a great point about people not seeing the horror in person while in production, but I’m writing a comic, so literally everything is already shown once I finish drawing. And still it has no emotional impact on me.

I wonder if they’re ever emotionally attached to their “art”?
If not, it explains a lot.

When people are very, very good at something it’s a given that they’re emotionally attached. You can’t be dispassionate and brilliant at the same time.

@Dutchess_lll…and that would explain a lot. Brilliance isn’t a word that comes to mind when thinking about most of those films.
All that aside, I have known plenty of artists that are emotionally attached to their work. That in no way means that others find their work exceptional or brilliant.

I was thinking of Steven King when I used it. He was brilliant! I agree that a lot of those horror movies are hogwash.

Not a bloody film but well, the makers of The Exorcist were brilliant imo. So brilliant that film still terrifies me to this day after more than 3 and a half decades.

I would love to hear how the film’s novelist / screenwriter and director’s sleep got affected if at all with that brilliantly terrifying and traumatizing film. Lol

The director of the LOTR films, Peter Jackson made an over the top gory movie, Dead Alive. It was so ridiculously bloody it ended up really funny to me. It has a wacky element to it so maybe that’s why. Peter Jackson probably had rare steaks each night after the shooting. Lol

I’ll tell you what terrorized me was Whatever Happened to Baby Jane!!!

Drew Barrymore couldn’t sleep for two weeks after she filmed Scream.