How do child actors exposed to gruesome scenes (like murder on a horror film) not get traumatized/PTSD?
In: Other
Generally they stage the scenes in a way that the kids don’t know anything going on, if memory serves the kids from The Shining didn’t even know it was a horror movie until they saw it as an adult.
It’s very easy to make it look like the actor is witnessing the events when they actually aren’t. The scenes in set also look a whole lot different than they do in the final screen version. A “night” shot can’t actually be very bright on the set and then is darkened in post. This will make the scene far less scary. The sets typically aren’t scary at all, everyone really is acting.
Lots of scenes are cut/edited in. The actor isn’t really looking at the “scene” as the viewer is. CGI is everywhere.
The set is usually busy and brightly lit. What the viewer sees is immersive – how the director wants it. But the set itself has people walking around, moving lights and cameras etc. This is why they’re called actors – they’re faking it. It is far less scary when you see a person manipulating the controls of a robotic dummy getting killed, for example.
Simple answer: they aren’t.
My son recently finished filming some scenes for a horror show and although his character witnessed a murder, he actually didn’t because they used various camera tricks and split the takes up so when it’s all put together, it looks like he was there.
I imagine for some scenes this simply isn’t possible, but so far all of the things he’s been in have been done this way. The union is very very picky about things like this.
It’s a very simple answer.
It’s fake. Most the time the kids aren’t even actually there when the scene is filmed and when they are its explained thoroughly to them before.
Also you gotta remember what you’re seeing in the movie is not what it looked like on the set. Stuff looks really fake on set and only looks real to you because of all the editing.
Child Psychologists have found that if viewers are shown that something is demonstrably fake, they are often not as affected by it.
I remember seeing a video in my “Children and the Media” course with a bunch of actors in the 70s showing how fake glass bottles were made (and broken over heads!) and how to make fake blood.
These simple demonstrations lessen the impact for children viewers of faked violence on TV or film.
For the actors, the experience of filming a scene is usually nothing like the end movie; the experience is even more fake. Filming a scene includes a ton of stopping and starting, cameras and lights and friendly people everywhere… Lots of food and crafts services and parents and agents everywhere.
The boundary between movie making and scary experience is really stretched to the limits when you are on set filming.
That said, the recent film about the Underground Railroad had a staff psychologist on set in case the actors were disturbed by being involved in scenes of slave masters torturing slaves.
So the movie making process can be a bit of innoculation against confusing things on set for reality but sometimes it’s worth going further just to be careful, especially with children.
Because they’re not actually gruesome. We see them perfectly edited with a scary soundtrack and without knowing the script and without seeing 50 people milling around holding coffees and snacks.
You can spare the kid the most realistic portions, but even more than that, the assistant director can just come over and be like, “So, Tim’s going to jump out of that box, covered in red syrup and yelling, and you’ve gotta run away, and then we’ll make you a sandwich?” And this kid has been around Tim for a week, and he’s a really nice guy, and he’s winking and being all funny scary before the scene, and the kid can barely get the giggles under control to shoot it. He wasn’t actually scared, he was just playing make believe for 5 minutes, stitched together 10 times.
They minimize the child’s exposure to the actual gore and violence, and make it look real in post production. For example, the kid who played Georgie in IT spent a lot of time with Bill Skarsgard, and was allowed to play with the props before the sewer scene. When the time came to film the scene, he liked Skarsgard, and he knew it was all just pretend, so it didn’t even faze him.
Several years ago, I was helping with some rated-r level Halloween decorations and someone brought their nine year old daughter. They thought the kid would be fine but when she saw one of the hyper-realistic masks in situ and flipped the fuck out… So like twenty minutes later, we grabbed another one of the masks and folded it up and put it in a box like it was new. The interaction basically went like this:
“Hey, so I want you to help me do some Halloween decorations. Inside this box is a mask and I want you take it out and unwrap it and put it on and be super scary.”
Kid opens the box and sees that it’s a similar mask and puts it on and now lord jesus, she was the scariest motherfucker in the room and I played into that fact. Her mom played into it. Everyone played into it.
And then I showed her how the decapitated head on a table works. “Hey crouch down in this box and put your head right here.” She did and I closed the back and she was the scariest decapitated child’s head I’ve ever seen in my life.
She had an absolute blast and wasn’t scared at all. Being part of the scary makes it not scary.
Depends on how the movie is shot. Generally kids won’t be involved in such scenes and will be edited in. There’s a few exceptions when the child plays a major role in scenes. The most notable is Corey Feldman in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter who during the climax would have been unable to film his shots separately. Apparently when Jason (Ted White) crashed though the window and grabbed Corey, he was unaware it was going to happen and the look on his face was genuine.
Latest Answers