5 Famous Movie Scenes That Were Totally Disgusting To Film

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5 Famous Movie Scenes That Were Totally Disgusting To Film

The movie business can be pretty messy, both metaphorically and literally. And that last part isn't a joke. Look at how ...

The Carnival Scene In The Sandlot Was Just As Gross In Reality

1993's The Sandlot is a classic coming-of-age story about a group of teenage boys who play sports and go on wacky adventures. Trying to sneak a kiss from a cute lifeguard, almost being eaten by a humongous dog, going on a dream quest with Babe Ruth -- you know, typical teenage stuff.

Then there's that one scene ... you know the one. The team celebrates a win at a carnival, with rides and copious amounts of chewing tobacco. The latter meets the former and, well ...

Those lumps of "chaw" the boys are masticating? They weren't tobacco, for reasons that should be obvious. They were actually something far worse: huge balls of licorice covered in bacon bits. And if you think that sounds like something a human being should be consuming of their own free will, you're probably Norwegian.

Imagine putting a big ol' hunk of that in your mouth ("I think some of us were stupid enough to swallow it") and then, the taste still lingering like a ghost made of bad decisions, riding an intense fairground ride 15 times in a row. According to Smalls himself, that experience resulted in most of the cast hurling for real. And now, if you'll excuse us, we have to type up a recipe for Fermented Licorice Bacon Wads. The Nords will surely pay top dollar.

Related: 5 Famous Movies That Used Horrifying Substances For Effects

The Dwarves In The Desolation Of Smaug Really Got "Fished"

The Hobbit movies were, to put it kindly, a crime against humanity that should not, could not, and will not be forgiven. Not least because of a studio-mandated production schedule that prioritized making the movies in as little time and for as little money as humanly possible. That meant that not only did Peter Jackson have less time to hand-fashion hundreds of pieces of armor, but he also had to rely on CGI way more than he did for Lord Of The Rings.

And it showed. Oh boy did it show.

Legolas defying physics by jumping up falling rocks
New Line Cinema
Perfect. Exactly what Tolkien was going for.

But that doesn't mean that all of the human suffering was inflicted upon the audience. The actors endured their parts, too. Midway through the second movie, The Desolation Of Smaug, our heroes need to get into Laketown to proceed. So a friendly human stuffs the 12 dwarves and one hobbit into barrels filled with fish to smuggle them in.

According to one of the actors, filming this scene left every actor who appeared in it covered in "fish juice." Absolutely everything was soaked in the nasty slurry -- their hair, clothes, prosthetics, any open orifices, everything. Moreover, in a hilarious twist of fate, one of the actors (Adam Brown; no relation) apparently had a massive "fish phobia," and while he managed to get through filming the scene, he had to be rescued by Andy Serkis afterwards. Serkis has played a lot of thankless roles in his time -- Gollum, Caesar the ape, Supreme Leader Snoke -- but his greatest part? Rotten fish hero.

Related: 5 Classic Movie Scenes That Were Surprisingly Gross To Make

All The Great Hall Scenes In The Harry Potter Series Reeked Of Rotting Food

One of the consistent visual high points of the Harry Potter films were those big feasts held in Hogwarts' Great Hall.

Nearly Headless Nick in the Great Hall
Warner Bros.
That said, the after-dinner spirits selection sucked.

The feast scenes looked so fun, so full of life, so magical. Perhaps the only thing that could spoil it would be the overwhelming odor of rotting food.

In an interview, Warwick Davis revealed that those banquets were filmed in continuous blocks of three or four days. As the crew didn't want to remake an entire banquet each morning, however, they would simply take the first days' food and leave it there for the entire duration. And if you were dumb enough to try to eat the food during this time, well ...

"You may film them for three or four days and the first day you step in there, they serve you a plate of food with lots of meats, vegetables and roast potatoes and you can eat the food ... The next day, they go, 'Don't eat the food' ... you just pretend now, it's been there all night. The fourth day, you could smell the Great Hall before you got in it. The food was the same food and it had quite an amazing smell."

Warwick Davis: undisputed master of understatement.

Related: 7 Special FX That Were Made Out Of Food (And Super Gross)

The Greyscale Scene From Game Of Thrones Involved A Bucket Of Pus

Hey, remember that surgery scene from Season 7 of Game Of Thrones? How Sam took a break from shoveling fruitcake poop to save Jorah Mormont from his creeping greyscale in the most gruesome fashion possible? We know, your brain is overcrowded with visuals from that show which you'd rather forget. So here's a reminder:

It's easily within the top 30 or 40 most disturbing things they've ever shown.

It wasn't any less gruesome behind the scenes, either. Iain Glen, the actor who plays Jorah, had to get up at 3 a.m. every morning and have "really detailed and intricate" latex prosthetics applied to his body. Prosthetics which were then peeled off when the cameras were rolling. And then there was the pus, which we're going to let Sam actor John Bradley describe because ... he's very descriptive:

"There were about five or six guys on set that day that you can't see but were just out of the camera line, there with pumps and buckets of pus. Mark Mylod, our director, would count down from three, and when we reached one, I would open up the tiny little hole in the prosthetic, and at that exact moment, the guy with the pus pump let it go and it squirted out of the hole. It was a real team effort. As I was pulling away at the prosthetic, they were pumping away and releasing more pus through the prosthetic. It looked disgusting on the day, too. It looks disgusting even when you know it's latex and that there's a man nearby with a bucket filled with creamy gunk. It looks so disgusting. You look down, and you genuinely believe in what it is ... you can imagine that it's pretty grim."

Related: 5 Simple Movie Scenes That Were An Insane Pain To Shoot

Real Skeletons Were Used For The Climactic Scene In Poltergeist

You'll remember this scene in Poltergeist from every nightmare you had after watching this scene from Poltergeist.

During the film's climax, mother Diane is dragged into the swimming pool and attacked by the skeletons buried under the family's property. As far as actress JoBeth Williams was aware, this scene was only a drag because it required her to spend a week scrambling around in a mud pit. After the fact, however, she discovered that she hadn't been wrestling with props. Those skeletons were the real deal.

According to Craig Reardon, one of the special effects artists who worked on the movie:

"I acquired a number of actual biological surgical skeletons, is what they're called. They're for hanging in classrooms in study. These are actual skeletons from people. I think the bones are acquired from India. We got 13 of these. And we dressed them so that they looked not like bleached, clean, bolted-together skeletons, but instead disintegrating cadavers. And, you know, added sculptured rubber and things to them so they would have a kind of dramatic leering spooky aspect and not be dull -- what am I trying to say -- clinical-type corpses, you know."

It's often said that the production of Poltergeist was haunted. One of the actors in Poltergeist 2: We Need To Find A New Realtor even refused to start filming unless an on-set exorcism had taken place. Without giving too much credence to curses, one thing they could've done to minimize the spookiness of their shoot was not desecrate a bunch of real corpses.

Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook, and has a newsletter dedicated to depressing history facts. It's not as heartbreakingly sad as it sounds, promise!

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