5 Movie Stunts That Went Horrifyingly Wrong

Burstyn played Linda Blair's mother, and at one point her demon-occupied daughter knocks her to the floor. Since Blair was only 13 at the time and wouldn't gain the true strength of a demon until her Hollywood Squares stint years later, the stunt was performed by wrapping a wire around Burstyn and pulling her to the ground. After the first attempt hurt Burstyn, Friedkin promised to go easy on the wire-pulling in the next take.

Warner Bros. Pictures via HuffPostHe did not.

The scene looks realistic in the movie because it is real -- Burstyn injured her coccyx and suffered a permanent lower back injury. "Coccyx" being an inherently amusing word wasn't enough to alleviate the situation, although the damage didn't stop her from going on to have a rich, full career, and also appear on Law & Order. Today she sounds about as gracious and forgiving as one could be about the incident, but the next time you watch the movie, keep in mind that her shout of pain is not acting.

That's Weston in the photo, filming a spacewalk sequence while hanging 30 feet above a concrete floor with no safety net and a single wire supporting him. Weston also lacked air holes in the back of his helmet, because Kubrick was afraid that light would filter through and ruin the verisimilitude of a movie that ends with a giant space baby. Instead, Wetson had a ten-minute air supply that piped into his sealed spacesuit ... which had no way for heat or carbon dioxide to dissipate.

Shockingly, this ended with a hot, woozy Weston passing out from oxygen deprivation, and as he signaled for help, the last thing he remembered was a crew member urging Kubrick to get him back to safety, and Kubrick complaining that they just got him up there. Kubrick resolved the scare by hiding from Wetson for a couple of days, and once the stuntman was no longer tempted to take a swing at him, he gave Wetson a swanky new dressing room, a fridge full of beer, and a big pay raise. Hey, at least it was an improvement from when he straight up gassed his stars.

To determine the difference between fiction and reality, Craig was given a small metal object, presumably the totem from Inception, to hold in one hand. If it fell to the floor, that would mean he had fallen unconscious for real. And indeed, Fincher heard the metal hit the ground, stopped the scene, and let Craig off early for the day once he regained consciousness. There's no word on whether Craig also got a beer fridge for his troubles.

In situations like that, movies normally use safety glass, which is tough to break and doesn't shatter into a million razor-sharp pieces if it does. But according to a lawsuit filed by Hickson that uses fancy legal words to make accusations of incredible ineptitude, the Ghostland set used regular glass ... which broke, sliced open her left cheek, and dug into her face. A bloody Hickson was rushed to the hospital, where she received 70 stitches to fix up a gash that stretched from her chin to near her left ear. By the following year, she'd undergone laser and silicone treatment, but was still left with a permanent scar.

Steve Blackburn/Getty Images for Mongrel MediaTrust us, you don't want to see the initial injury.

It's up to the courts to decide whether she's lost income because of the accident, and whether the production company is liable. But the easily avoidable injury wasn't exactly worth it for the sake of fine art, as Ghostland ended up rocking a 44 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. One critic said that while the performances were fine, the movie was full of meaningless cruelty, and that the whole affair seemed like an excuse to show the torture of young women. We guess the universe has a grim sense of irony.

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