The temperature of the fire quickly reached 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and, while Tarantino and the crew were wearing fire suits, Roth and Doom were only coated in a jelly meant to protect their skin. The heat was so unbearable that Eli Roth passed out once the scene was over, and had to spend the next day with his head and hands in ice. But he still got off lucky.

The platform they were shooting on was about 10 seconds away from collapse when Tarantino called cut and everyone fled. Had they shot even a few seconds longer, Eli Roth and Omar Doom would have burned to death. Or almost to death -- it would have been awful either way.

But it might have been worth a handful of sympathy-Oscars.

The only indication in the movie of how out of control everything got is that giant swastika over the stage behind Roth and Doom. It collapses and crashes to the ground during the fire, but it was never supposed to fall. In fact, it was supported by massive steel cables precisely so it wouldn't fall, but those cables promptly melted in the unbearable heat of the fire.

So as you watch that scene, remember that the two actors are standing in a room that's so hot it's melting steel. We can only hope the guy who played Hitler was OK, because at this point we're assuming they really shot him in the face.

Near the end of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (so, you know, spoiler alert), all of Sally's (the main character's) friends are dead and hanging from meat hooks or crammed into freezers in the basement. Sally is tied to a chair at a dinner table while the family of murdering cannibals sits around, taunting her. The scene is well over five minutes long, filled with screaming, close-ups of her pupils and some almost unwatchable psychological torture from Leatherface and his family.

"Thomas told us all about you. More potatoes, dear?"

As an audience, sitting through the entire scene, from the moment they feed the grandfather some of her blood to the point when they try to kill her with a hammer, is excruciating. Watching it feels a little like punishment, which isn't that surprising, considering it was infinitely worse for the actors shooting the scene.

Because there was some legitimate psychological torture taking place in that house during the shoot, and it wasn't just aimed at Sally (Marilyn Burns). They shot for 27 hours straight in that dining room in the middle of a Texas summer with temperatures outside reaching 110 degrees, so it was even hotter inside the house, since they blocked off the windows to keep out the light. If that wasn't bad enough, there were also piles of festering head cheese on the dining room table that were originally just props, but pretty quickly made the rooms smell like a rotting carcass.

"It's all worth it for what I'm sure will be a Best Picture nomination!"

All of these elements combined in a perfect mind-melting storm for the actors and crew. Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface, probably caught it the hardest. He was wearing a heavy leather mask that couldn't be washed the entire shoot (that would cause continuity errors if stains vanished and reappeared in between shots), so he was essentially suffering in his own tiny, stinking oven. Supposedly he got so muddled from the heat that he thought he was actually supposed to kill Marilyn Burns.

In the scene where Leatherface cuts Burns' finger so that the old man can suck her blood, the device that was supposed to release the fake blood clogged for several takes in a row. Hansen, whose mind was already broken and who was willing to do anything to get out of that room, turned away from everyone, removed the safety tape from the knife and then just cut open Marilyn's finger for real.

"Quit squirming or I'm going to screw this up!"

So what you're actually seeing is her blood and her real reaction to having her finger sliced open while tied down in a 115-degree house with people around her who can't remember if they sincerely want her dead or not.

As you can see, they achieved a very realistic "getting sprayed in the head with a hose" shot by actually spraying her in the head with a hose. What's the harm in that? Well, because she had turned her face away from the spray, the water shot directly into her ear, rupturing her eardrum. It was so painful that she collapsed and passed out immediately.

"No! Unconsciouser!"

She was deaf in that ear for six months following the accident. So what you're actually seeing in that scene is a young girl who's legitimately unconscious from a shattered tympanum, getting sprayed in the face with a fire hose. And then people paid to watch it! Hollywood magic!

Sure, there were the usual Kubrick head games, like insisting that McDowell's character, Alex, have a pet snake despite the fact that McDowell was terrified of snakes (it wasn't in the script). But really, you haven't gotten the full Kubrick treatment until you've suffered some kind of real, medical damage.

So, for instance, during the scene in which a man forces Alex to the ground and stomps on him, the man insisted on selling the realism by actually stomping on McDowell's chest, cracking his ribs.

That's how you know you're doing it right. Acting is a lot like CPR that way.

But hands down the most torturous scene for McDowell was the most famous: the "rehabilitation" scene.

That's when Alex is forced to watch hours of rape and violence with his eyes pried open with what looks like tiny barbecue tongs attached to orthodontia headgear. During that scene, the doctor you see sitting there next to him, applying eye drops to keep Alex's eyes from drying out, was in fact an actual doctor who needed to be there applying those drops or McDowell risked becoming permanently blinded.

"Surprise! The drops are actually Tabasco sauce."

Still, even with those precautions, the apparatus scratched McDowell's cornea so severely that he wanted to stop the shoot. Instead of halting production until it healed, Kubrick told him, "Let's go on with the scene, I'll favor your other eye."

So when you see Alex sitting there in the straitjacket with his eyes pried open by the lid locks, screaming for them to stop it, we have no idea how much of that was acting. We're guessing neither did Kubrick.

Lucia
"Now, Malcolm, I'm going to show you a slideshow of nude photos I took of myself. DO YOU SEE?"