21 Hollywood Facts That Are Just Plain Creepy, Creepy, Creepy, KER-REEPY

I love a good behind-the-scenes movie fact, even when they're dark — but fair warning, these ones from the BuzzFeed Community* are more than a little freaky. Read on if you want to see these movies in a wholeeee new light.

*There are also a few from r/MovieDetails and from yours truly!

1.Final Destination reportedly used real footage from the TWA 800 wreckage (a 1996 plane crash that was one of the most deadly in history) for the plane crash scene in the movie. Also, there was also a group of American high school students on a class trip to France on TWA Flight 800, just like the film.

2.One of the dolphins that played Flipper (in the show of the same name) allegedly killed itself after the show ended and she was confined to a tank. According to her former trainer, Ric O'Barry, she swam to him, then stopped breathing. "You have to understand dolphins and whales are not air breathers like we are. Every breath they take is a conscious effort. They can end their life whenever," O'Barry told Oprah.

3.We can't confirm this, but there have long been reports and rumors that over 20 kittens were killed on the set of The Adventures of Milo and Otis.

4.There are also claims about a ton of animal cruelty on Heaven's Gate, such as literally blowing up a horse with dynamite. The director and producer would not comment, and the head wrangler on the film claimed the horse was simply injured by an explosion.

5.Bo Derek, who played Jane in 1981's Tarzan, the Ape Man, was almost killed by a lion onscreen. The footage stayed in the final cut — in fact, the scene was adjusted so that the attack could be included.

United Artists/Cinema International Corporation

The lion — which had fixated on Derek — unexpectedly darted for her while filming a scene where she first meets Tarzan (played by Miles O'Keeffe). O'Keeffe put himself between the lion and Derek, who tried to crawl to safety into the water where the lion would not follow. She got away, but not before the lion sliced her shoulder with his paw.

6.In Back to the Future Part III, star Michael J. Fox almost died on set. In the scene where his character gets hanged (before Doc saves him), a stunt double was used for the wide shots — but Fox himself did the close-ups. He was initially standing on a box, but the swinging wasn't realistic, so he offered to go without the box and use his hands to keep the rope from suffocating him. On the third take of doing this, Fox "miscalculated the positioning of [his] hand" and quickly passed out. Everyone thought he was just acting and did nothing for a few seconds until director Robert Zemeckis realized the truth.

7.The same thing happened to Brendan Fraser in The Mummy. He was directed to "sell it" more, so on the next take, he stood extra high on his toes — and the rope was pulled higher up. "The next thing I knew, my elbow was in my ear, the world was sideways, and there was gravel in my teeth," Fraser said. Luckily, he was alright.

Universal Pictures

Suggested by u/Greendead

8.The Brady Bunch kids almost died while filming an episode at an amusement park — as they were about to board a rollercoaster, actor Robert Reed (who played the family patriarch) pointed out that the camera on the car looked unstable. They decided to do a test run and found that the camera would've likely killed the family had they been on the coaster.

9.Two people died at separate screenings of The Passion of the Christ, which was criticized for the amount of violence shown. A Kansas woman died of a heart attack during the crucifixion scene, and less than a month later, a Brazilian priest also died of a heart attack in the middle of a screening of the film with his congregation.

10.Shelley Malil, perhaps best known for costarring as Haziz in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, was later imprisoned for stabbing his ex-girlfriend 23 times in front of a friend while her children slept upstairs. She survived, and he was released after eight years, against the wishes of his victims. He blamed his actions in part on a lack of roles following The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

11.Actor Johnny Lewis — who had once dated Katy Perry and is allegedly the person "The One That Got Away” is about — murdered his landlady, killed her cat, then attacked a house painter and his neighbor (who were able to escape), before dying from what was ruled an accidental fall in 2012. Ironically, Lewis had left Sons of Anarchy years prior because it was too "violent." In the years since, he had played a serial killer on Criminal Minds and starred in the horror film Lovely Molly.

12.Multiple films have used real skeletons rather than fake ones, including Frankenstein, Poltergeist, and Dawn of the Dead. The last example is one of the most interesting — the props department had been told the skeleton was fake, only to discover later on that it was a 30-something woman who had died a century before when a police officer noticed it looked a little too real in the display window of a props store.

13.Some films even use real cadavers (aka, dead bodies) — sometimes unknowingly, like in the case of Apocalypse Now. When police investigated, they found that the cadavers were real and actually being supplied by grave robbers. In fact, local authorities had to investigate everyone on set because the bodies were unidentified and the people could have been killed by someone on set.

14.A handyman allegedly obsessed with Psycho reportedly set out to murder Marli Renfro, the woman who acted as Janet Leigh's body double in the notorious shower scene, but killed the wrong person by accident. His victim, it turns out, was Myra Davis (who also went by her stage name Myra Jones), who was Leigh's stand-in for lighting and staging, but not the double seen on screen in the shower scene (though her hand is seen briefly).

15.While shooting The Crow, star Brandon Lee was killed when costar Michael Massee shot him with an improperly loaded prop gun. He was almost done filming the movie, and it was apparently the last scene he had to film involving weapons — he was also hoping to move away from physical roles and more into dramas with his next film. He was 28.

16.Something similar happened to Jon-Erik Hexum on the set of the show Cover Up. He was reportedly pretending to play Russian Roulette with a prop gun — he fired a blank, which fractured his skull and caused a brain hemorrhage. He was 26.

17.He's not the only actor to die during filming. Tommy Cooper, a Welsh comedian and magician, actually died on live TV while performing on the British variety show Live from Her Majesty's. Cooper suffered a heart attack moments after he began a segment, but the audience, believing it was simply a part of the sketch, just laughed as he died.

18.Comedian Redd Foxx, best known for Sanford and Son, died on set while rehearsing for a scene in The Royal Family. Like Cooper, when he fell, everyone thought he was joking. His character on Sanford and Son was known for faking heart attacks. Unfortunately, this was a real heart attack, and Foxx died.

19.A Nightmare on Elm Street was based on true occurrences — director Wes Craven says he came up with the plot for the film after reading an article "about a family who had escaped the Killing Fields in Cambodia" in the LA Times. “Things were fine, and then suddenly, the young son was having very disturbing nightmares. He told his parents he was afraid that if he slept, the thing chasing him would get him, so he tried to stay awake for days at a time. When he finally fell asleep, his parents thought this crisis was over. Then they heard screams in the middle of the night. By the time they got to him, he was dead. He died in the middle of a nightmare."

20.Horror movies can be just as scary on set as they are onscreen. For example, on the set of Annabelle, multiple freaky things happened, including a light fixture falling on the actor who played the janitor in the same hallway that his character is killed by a light fixture in the script. (The script must have changed, perhaps after this incident, as I can't find the scene in the finished film.)

21.And finally, after filming The Possession, a horror film about a dybbuk box (aka an evil spirit in a box), the box used for the film was put in a storage area with the other props. The storage area then "burnt to the ground" inexplicably — star Jeffrey Dean Morgan said that investigators found "no signs of arson, no electrical fire.”

What's a creepy movie, TV, or otherwise Hollywood-related fact that keeps you up at night? Let us know in the comments!