The Horror File: Bride of Hollywood Horror Trivia

Ever wonder where the "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" monkeys come from? It's from a sculpture in the small Japanese town of Nikko. The name was used for the leader of the Wicked Witch's winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz (1939).

The demon Pinhead was actually listed as Lead Cenobite in Hellraiser (1987). Fans nicknamed him Pinhead afterwards, and he was properly dubbed Pinhead in the sequels.

Elsa Lanchester played her scenes as the Bride of Frankenstein (1935) wearing stilts to supplement her diminutive height to make her seven feet tall. By coincidence, Boris Karloff broke his leg falling into a well during filming. While we're atn it, Colin Clive, who played Dr. Frankenstein, broke his leg before filming began due to a horse-riding accident and spent most of the film sitting.

To lend authenticity to the shock inherent in the chest-bursting scene in Alien (1979), John Hurt, the victim, was privately briefed then the whole scene shot without telling the other actors what to expect. Veronica Cartwright got "alien" blood right in the face. Hurt brilliantly paraodied the chest-bursting scene in Mel Brooks' Spaceballs (1987).

Christopher Lee has only 13 spoken lines in Horror of Dracula (1958), the first of Hammer's Dracula remakes.

Told by the studio that he was forbidden to kill off Jack Nicholson in any movie, director Tim Burton cast Nicholson as the president and as a hustler in Mars Attacks (1996)...and killed off both characters. Of course, Burton had already killed Nicholson off when he played the Joker in Batman (1989), too.

How do you put air tanks inside the suit of The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)? You don't. That's why Ricou Browning was hired as stunt-monster. He could hold his breath for four minutes at a time.

Steve McQueen's first lead role was in the infamous low-budget movie, The Blob (1959). Actually better than many simuilar films of the era, it was intended as the bottom half of a double-feature, but its success moved it up to top-billed feature. By the way, curious about what the Blob was made of? A small weather balloon and silicon gel.

Much of the movement of the man-eating shark in Jaws (1975) was done from the shark's point-of-view, contributing greatly to the film. The result was serendipitous" the real reason for it was because Bruce, the mechanical shark, had a tendency to break down too much.

Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946) featured costumes designed by none other than Pierre Cardin.

If the Martian war machines in War of the Worlds (1953) looks alien but still vaguely familiar, there may be a reason. With their wing-like bodies and death rays firing from atop gooseneck arms, the design was supposedly inspired by swans.

Horror movies which use conflict with a satanic or similarly evil figures as a theme often wind up with a reputation as being cursed, as in the case of The Exorcist or Poltergeist (1982). The Omen (1976) shares the reputation of being cursed after Gregory Peck narrowly missed being a passenger on an airplane that crashed with no survivors, the screenwriter's plane was struck by lightning, the director's hotel was bombed, and on the first day of shooting, several crewmembers were involved in a serious car crash.

Director James Whale wanted no one else but Claude Rains with his distinctive, cultured voice to play The Invisible Man (1933), rejecting the studio choice of Boris Karloff, who had become a star with Whale's Frankenstein (1931). It was a star-making role for Rains.

Location filming along the Italian coast was delayed on Jason and the Argonauts (1963) when the replica of the Argo encountered another replica, this of the Golden Hind from the TV series Sir Francis Drake, ruining the shooting for both film crews.