Since Halloween is this weekend, E! News put together a list of 31 interesting facts about horror movies. Here are 17 of our favorites:
1. “The Exorcist” is the first horror movie to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It lost out to “The Sting”.
2. In “The Exorcist”, Linda Blair’s character was supposed to vomit on Father Karras’ chest. But the tube they used misfired, and it hit him in the face. So the look of disgust as he wipes off the vomit is genuine.
3. The vomit used in “The Exorcist” consists mostly of pea soup.
4. The blood used in “Night of the Living Dead” is chocolate syrup. Of course, the movie was in black-and-white. (This was actually common in black-and-white films. It was used for the shower scene in “Psycho” as well.)
5. The color red is present in almost every shot of “The Shining”.
6. Due to his experience as a volunteer firefighter, Jack Nicholson took down the prop door with the ax in “The Shining” too quickly. They had to switch it with a real door for that scene.
7. While filming “Scream”, the actors were never allowed to see the man who voices Ghostface. Director Wes Craven thought it would make their performances more realistic, and so the guy, Roger L. Jackson, would hide on set and actually make the phone calls during scenes.
8. Sissy Spacek slept in her bloody clothes for three days while filming the “Carrie” prom scene in order to maintain continuity.
9. None of the actors and actresses who were playing high school students in “Carrie” were actually teenagers.
10. The original title for “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” was ‘Head Cheese’.
11. The original title for “Halloween” was ‘The Babysitter Murders’.
12. Church the cat in “Pet Sematary” is played by seven different cats.
13. The story for “Final Destination” was actually an abandoned idea for an “X-Files” episode.
14. “Saw” was filmed in only 18 days. There are no exterior shots because they couldn’t afford them.
15. It only took eight days to film “The Blair Witch Project”.
16. To make the tension between the actors authentic in “The Blair Witch Project”, the directors gave them less and less food each day.
17. You may have heard this one before, but it’s still pretty amazing: “Psycho” was the first American movie to show a toilet being flushed. That was in 1960.
(EOnline.com has the full list.)