How Child Actors Star In Horror Movies Without Being Traumatized

Being a child actor is a tough job. Between having to balance work and school, dealing with abuse from scornful peers or mean-spirited "fans," or having to deal with cruel directors or stressful work conditions, it can be a difficult life. When you put a lot of pressure on a young child to always perform, that's how you end up with a hard luck story like Natalie Wood's. When you toss on traumatic subject matter for the kids to muck through — such as having to deal with stories that deal with subjects like addiction and abuse — things can be even tougher. And then there's the horror genre, where small kids can be fed into wood chippers — both figuratively and, depending on the film, perhaps even literally.

Being soaked in stage blood and asked to run around screaming might be among the toughest experiences any child actor is ever asked to go through. How on earth do they manage to get through shoots like these and come out the other side with fully intact and healthy psyches? It turns out that there are plenty of ways to make sure the children are all right, from turning the movie business into a game to talking frankly to them about what they'll witness on set and on the screen.

Here are just some of the ways child actors have survived life on a horror film set without losing their minds — and a few cautionary stories about some unfortunate kids who weren't protected as they should have been.

What's the best way to beat back fear while working on a horror movie? A good case of the giggles should work, especially when you're a child actor. Indeed, for some kids working in the horror genre, life can be a real party.

Carrie Henn — who disappeared from Hollywood after her sole appearance on the silver screen as Newt in "Aliens" — recalls having a whale of a time while putting the sci-fi horror movie together. For example, when she filmed the scary-beyond-all-reason scene where Newt is yanked from the water by a Xenomorph, Henn recalls having fun splashing around in the water. "The first assistant director had actually had someone stay there overnight, to make sure the water stayed warm," she told Wired. "But it was actually too warm for me, so I would sit up on bars on the side, and the alien and I would stay up there, kicking our feet in the water." During a cast reunion on "The Today Show," Henn confessed that she would actually blow her lines deliberately so she could ride the giant slide again and again.

All in all, Henn came away from the experience a happy person and now stands among the ranks of child actors with normal grown-up jobs. "You would think I'd have nightmares about it, people don't quite understand why I don't, but I think it's because they made it into such a fun experience for me," she told TooFab. Part of her ability to compartmentalize the experience seems to stem from one important thing — she had good parents looking out for her.

What keeps a child star from becoming overwhelmed or problematic? Often, it's a parent who's not afraid to make sure their kid stays grounded. A good guardian — less a stage parent and more a concerned adult — is the most valuable tool in a child actor's kit, as they can keep a whole host of abuses from happening when things get hairy on set. "The Shining" twins Louise and Lisa Burns, for instance, told Cosmopolitan that their parents were very supportive of their acting careers while also being protective of them while they worked on the movie. "We had to be escorted all the time. But our parents were never worried or thought that we should stop shooting the film. They were and are very supportive of us," they said of their experience.

Many child actors sport equally supportive parents who either protected them from scripts that were far too dark for or helped them prepare for their spooky roles. Haley Joel Osment recalls his dad helping him run lines and breaking down the meaning behind the film he was working on when prepping for movies like "The Sixth Sense" or "A.I." "My parents were always on set and they very quickly had the right attitude towards it," he told Vulture. "We weren't doing anything outside of the movie and press because I was going to school and doing normal kid stuff. My parents always emphasized school more than anything."

But not even a good parent can protect a kid actor from every danger they might experience. After all, this life comes equipped with chills and thrills, though, hopefully, most of those take place in the finished product instead of on the set. When it comes to child actors, there are major regulations in place to keep them from getting hurt while filming horror movies. That includes using special effects or hiring adults who can stand in for the kids when shooting any potentially dangerous scenes. Usually, this keeps the trauma — both physical and mental — at a minimum for everyone involved, but there have been some major exceptions to this rule, and a number of teens and kids have sadly found themselves in a world of hurt because of those directorial choices.

One example of such an incident happened to Linda Blair on the set of "The Exorcist." Director William Friedkin chose to use Blair's studio-mandated stunt double as little as possible onscreen, opting instead to put his young star in the thick of most of the action — which resulted in Blair being strapped into a harness for a scene where Regan MacNeil thrashes around in her bed. Because of the way the stunt equipment was built, it damaged her spine, leaving Blair with scoliosis. "The back injury was far more serious than I ever imagined and really affected my health negatively for a long time," the actor later elaborated to The Daily Telegraph. Eventually she got treatment for her injuries. Thankfully — thanks to forethought, laws, and union rules — Blair's story isn't the norm on most horror sets.

And then there are the directors who come from a completely different place from the William Friedkins of the world. These directors thoroughly protect their child actors to the point that they have no idea they're acting in a horror film at all. For these kids, the whole world is a gigantic wonderland, and the film's set is not one of nightmarish gloom but a place of fun and frivolity.

One of the best examples of an actor protected by such an on set edict is Danny Lloyd, who was highly sheltered from the gristle and gore on the set of "The Shining." Director Stanley Kubrick went so far as to lie to Lloyd about the film's story; Lloyd thought he was acting in a family drama. In one of the more bizarre things that happened on the set of "The Shining," Kubrick used a dummy for Shelley Duvall to carry through the halls of The Overlook Hotel, a move designed to keep Lloyd from coping with horrors beyond his comprehension.

"I specifically remember I was banned from the set for the entire time Scatman Crothers was being axed," Lloyd recalled in an interview with The Guardian, adding that he wasn't scared once while filming the movie. Now a schoolteacher, Lloyd only got the full impact of "The Shining" when he watched it as a teenager, having been shown a brief, ten-minute, gore-free cut when he was younger.

While some actors remember every excruciating detail of being in a horror film, plenty of child actors can't recall what it was like to be on the set of their most famous performances because they were so young when they took place. It's quite the definitive way to avoid anything resembling trauma, but it likely leaves the actors wondering how they made it through each shoot. As toddlers or young children at the time, they only have the vaguest of recollections about what they said and did.

Miko Hughes made a name for himself in the acting world as a kid, appearing in movies as varied as "Apollo 13" and "Kindergarten Cop." But when it comes to playing Gage Creed in the 1989 version of "Pet Sematary," a role he performed as a toddler, he doesn't have many memories. "I don't think I knew I was acting for Pet Sematary; I was just playing pretend. I was practically a baby," Miko Hughes confessed to Scream Magazine about his time on the set. That also means his performance as Gage — intense and yet naturalistic — was not overly coached but was simply Hughes having fun. Talk about impressive work!

But while Hughes was simply a young kid enjoying himself in the world's bloodiest playhouse, other young horror actors see their roles not as an excuse to be frightened but as another paycheck, just one more role among many.

The acting business is, at its core, a business, and for some child actors, being in a horror movie is just another day at the blood factory. Most of the kids working on these films are sophisticated enough to know that what they're seeing around them isn't real, that they're only pretending to be scared when they run away from the monsters haunting their character.

A common thread among these actors is the ability to keep fact and fiction separate. "My mum and I both knew exactly what we were getting into," Jodelle Ferland, who played Sharon and Alessa in the big-screen version of "Silent Hill," told Cosmopolitan. "I grew up on movie sets and she knew that it wouldn't really affect me –I knew that it was all make-believe." Sometimes, the scariest thing for these kids wasn't dodging mock death, it was dealing with childhood angst. "The aliens were all my friends, wearing suits. I was actually most nervous about going to the cafeteria for lunch, because I had to go in-character as Newt, and I thought everybody would be staring at me," Carrie Henn admitted to Wired.

And then there's Alex Vincent, king of the "Child's Play" saga. He confessed he was never scared on the set of the Chucky-laden movie series because he enjoyed himself so thoroughly. "It was too much fun: working and doing the same thing over and over again all day," he told Conventional Relations. "It was a different perspective entirely."

Young actors can be pretty smart cookies, which means that they don't need too much direction to understand that they're acting in a horror movie and — instead of reacting to it with fear or disgust — are able to read a script and wonder how the crew will put together each scene or how each effect will be created. That was how Linda Blair approached "The Exorcist" before she became a part of movie history. "When I first read the novel before auditioning, I saw it more from the perspective of a kid," the actress told Dread Central. "How were they going to do these things? How was the bed going to levitate? That kind of stuff."

A healthy ability to understand the realities of moviemaking definitely can help to keep child actors grounded and their curious minds active. In some cases, it can even turn those kids into directors when they grow up. But insulation from some of the realities of what they're playing out, in some cases, can be crucial to having a normal life. According to Blair — who wasn't raised Catholic — not knowing about the devil provided her a sense of safety from Reagan's suffering. "I always say, it's probably a good thing they didn't hire a Catholic child, who may have heard about the devil, the things that were in the closet," she told The Daily Telegraph.

There are, of course, some child actors who are so professional that the notion of being scared and giving in to the power of fiction feels verboten. They're so well-versed in the art of being an actor that they're more than happy to ignore the horrors around them to give the best possible performance. There are so many kid actors who are so laser-focused on their own performances that paying attention to anything taking place around them seems ridiculous.

Isabelle Fuhrman worked on "Orphan" at the age of ten and confessed to People that the role involved intense preparation — so intense that she had no room to be scared. The young actor made a copious amount of notes and ended up taking the role quite seriously, innovating a great deal of Esther's quirks. Returning to the character's world years later for the prequel, "Orphan: First Kill," excited the actor, who feels a certain amount of possessiveness regarding Esther's existence. "I created her, she's mine," she told People. "Obviously I had so much help on the first movie with the look and all sorts of stuff, but her emotions and the essence of who she was was something that I created as a kid." Fuhrman's love of the horror genre is clear — and sometimes it's that love for horror that helps kids in the industry deal with the fright.

Some child actors get into the horror industry not because it's another paycheck or a chance to bounce about on the world's biggest playground; some of them really love the genre and would do anything to be in a scary film. Take Milly Shapiro, who was barely sixteen when she made a name for herself in "Hereditary" and the "A Quiet Place" saga. It turns out that she took on her first horror-centric role because she really, really likes scary movies.

"I'm a huge horror fan, and it was on my bucket list to be in horror movies: both as someone who wasn't getting scared and someone who dies,'" she told Daily Dead. "I was like, 'This is both of the things I want to be in a horror movie combined." She added that she and her sister used to run around in their backyard making horror movies when she was younger. While Shapiro is now an adult, she seems to have fond memories of her time making the film, even though she was nervous to work with so many experienced actors. But what happens when everything fails and the child actor is traumatized by the experience?

Sadly, not every kid actor is as lucky as most of those discussed above. Some children who worked in the horror genre admit that every failsafe was skipped when they worked on their films. Sometimes that leads to trauma, either on the set or off. It can also result in bitter memories, typecasting, or even offscreen fears.

Some of these sets left deep, traumatic scars on the psyches of their young actors. Wil Wheaton explained on his blog that no one was looking out for him on the set of 1987's "The Curse." "I would not sign anything associated with that movie, because I was abused and exploited during production," Wheaton explained. He went on to say that his parents forced him to do the role, that the movie broke labor laws, and he and his sister were abused on the set.

Wheaton's experience is one of the worst possible results of working on a horror film as a kid, but others have experienced different types of trauma related to their scary movie roles. Kyle Richards told Halloween Daily News that she wasn't traumatized by filming the movie but was so scared watching it afterward that she slept with her mom until she was a teenager. "It was obviously not child appropriate, and we both were traumatized," she confessed.

But even though most child stars don't regret their horror pasts, many wouldn't allow their own progeny to have a similar experience. "You know what, I wouldn't let my child do it," Linda Blair told The Telegraph. "I mean, I can't disagree with people. I can only tell you that I didn't understand."