5 Great Movie Scenes Made Possible by Reckless Endangerment

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.

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.

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.

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.

While most girls will remember standing in the crowd at their high school prom vaguely wishing they could kill the prom queen, Carrie flips that expectation by allowing the prom queen to psychokinetically murder all her classmates at once.

It starts when the social outcast Carrie White falls for that old classic prank: drenched-by-a-pail-o'-pig's-blood-connected-to-a-rope-leading-to-John-Travolta-under-the-stage. While Carrie has no sense of humor about the cruel prank, she does have telekinesis, which she uses to lock all the doors of the prom, and to slowly murder all the faculty and students present.

Carrie's primary weapon in the scene is a fire hose that winds around the gym like a snake, spraying students until they fall through tables (there's a type of snake that does that, right?). During the shooting of that scene, director Brian De Palma wanted shots of some of the meaner characters getting hit directly in the face with the water, but the firefighters on set said hitting people in the face, even actors, was too dangerous given the extreme water pressure.

To which Brian De Palma countered, "Ehh," and shot the kids in the face anyway. Check out actress P.J. Soles at 4:40 (the one who inexplicably wore a baseball cap to the prom):

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.

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!

We've covered Stanley Kubrick's torture tactics in a previous article, but the guy did so many horrible things to actors throughout his career that we have to wonder if he just decided on directing because it offered a legal loophole for abuse. While shooting A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick did all of his signature crazy shit, like shooting simple scenes 40 or 50 times, but he also practiced a more personal brand of cruelty, focusing it almost exclusively on Malcolm McDowell.

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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.

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.

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.

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So, for a take that required the camera to smash through a window pane toward one of the lead actresses, they saw no other way of doing it than to just smash an actual window. When you see the actress shielding her head in that shot, it's because she doesn't want it to be sliced open by the actual shards of glass flying at her face.

Keep in mind, all of this was happening in a rented a cabin out in the woods with no running water and no heat (they had to wash their hands with scalding hot water from the coffee maker) over the course of 15 months. At one point Bruce Campbell sprained his ankle, and for the next two weeks, Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert would poke at it with sticks to ensure that he kept limping in every scene.

But arguably the most dangerous moment of the entire shoot was the scene in which Bruce Campbell had to fight off a possessed woman who was trying to stab him with a dagger. The trouble was that the contact lenses they used for that iconic possessed look were completely opaque.

So the actress who was supposed to attack him was effectively blind. Oh, and the dagger? It was real. So while the actress' job was to run in Bruce Campbell's general direction, swinging the dagger out in front of her, his job was to not die. If that scene in the movie seems more real than any others, it's because he is legitimately trying to avoid being stabbed.

It's not entirely clear why they were so insistent on using a real blade, but Rob Tapert has a very telling quote on how he feels about actors. After one of the actresses cut her feet to shreds during a bare-footed running scene in the woods, he noticed the blood tracks and said, "I like it when an actor bleeds. It makes me feel like I got my money's worth."

Granted, the budget of that entire movie was less than $400,000, so the actors were probably getting paid in Sizzler coupons, but hey, that's worth bleeding for, right?

For more hell-on-earth acting conditions, check out 6 Beloved TV Shows (That Traumatized Cast Members For Life) and The 5 Most Horrifyingly Wasteful Film Shoots.

If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out The Most Screwed Over Man in the History of Movies.

And stop by LinkSTORM to learn how to get that ringing out of your ears (with more fireworks).

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