How are Child Actors Kept Safe on Horror Sets?

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With the recent release of Quiet on Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV, an exposé on the exploitation of child actors during Nickelodeon’s early days, the topic of children in the film industry has had increasing discourse. Children of all ages are in every genre and medium of the audio-visual industry, and child labor issues, finances, education, and social life arise. However, a particular question emerges when a mature story calls for a young character to appear: How are children in disturbing movies, like horror, protected during filming? 

The appeal of children in horror films is pervasive. As film writer Nathan Chen writes for Medium, “Children, those beacons of purity and simplicity, become vessels for the supernatural, giving birth to a paradox as compelling as it is horrifying.” From The Exorcist franchise to It, The Shining, and more recent films such as The Black Phone, the loss of innocence juxtaposed with an evil entity is chilling. Chen also mentions the unpredictability of children acting irrationally and suddenly. When possessed by a demonic, evil entity, that unpredictability becomes terrifying and an ideal vessel for jump-scares. 

What about the child actors who play these demonic children, though? Are they exposed to the gruesome images and shocking creatures that delight audiences? Interviews with some of the more iconic child actors say no—their on-set experiences were carefully guarded by parents, directors, and co-stars. Shelly Duvall, appearing as Wendy Torrance in The Shining, was famously abused and mistreated on set by director Stanley Kubrick. However, Danny Lloyd, who played Danny Torrance some 45 years ago, revealed in a 2017 interview that he had no idea the movie was a horror film, that “I specifically remember I was banned from the set for the entire time Scatman Crothers was being axed,” and that he was shown a 10-minute kid-friendly cut of the movie. 

The famous twins from the same film, Lisa and Louise Burns, told Cosmopolitan, “They were very concerned that we would be frightened of the fake blood in the scene where we’ve been murdered. So [makeup artist] Tom [Smith] showed us how he made his ‘blood’ and it really looked just like the real thing. He even let us each keep a bottle, which we still have!” They emphasize the fun they had on set and the care given to their young psyches by all the adults around them. 

Not every child actor in an iconic horror role has such favorable views of their time in the industry. 45 years after Linda Blair appeared as Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist, she reflected to The Telegraph that what she experienced on set as a 13-year-old with director William Friedkin wasn’t psychologically damaging, as she “can only tell you that I didn’t understand. I never knew what that was about. I thought it was very odd that I had a cross and that I was sticking it in a box saying terrible language. But I have to say that I did not understand.” However, during stunts where she was strapped into harnesses and levitating over her bed, she suffered from a spine fracture that left her with scoliosis and corrosive makeup that burned her skin badly. She said the worst was yet to come, though, as at just 13, she received death threats and harassment as the star of a film with a controversial religious message. Blair told Dread Central, “they thought I had all the answers about faith and Catholicism…They’d put me on planes for these ridiculously long trans-Atlantic flights…, and then I’d be thrust in front of hundreds of people I often couldn’t understand who were putting their faith into my hands. It was horrible.” She appeared in a couple more horror films, typecast for the short remainder of her acting career in exploitative movies and low-grade slasher flicks.

Additionally, the effects of watching horror movies at a young age have been widely studied, with a 2006 study by psychologist Dr Mark Winwood showing that “kids who watch violent content are more likely to develop anxiety, sleep disorders and aggressive behaviors.” The effects of working in the environment of a horror film as a child appear to be mostly well-protected, but the media frenzy and public response are often too much for a young actor to bear.