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'Nosferatu' (1922) -

The terrifying Count Orlok in the silent horror 'Nosferatu' only blinks once during the entire film. The moment occurs near the end of part one, for those curious enough to look out for it!

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'The Exorcist' (1973) -

'The Exorcist' was the first horror movie ever to be nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture. Scary movies rarely see much action during awards season, but 'The Exorcist' earned 10 nominations at the Oscars in 1974.

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'Psycho' (1960) -

Alfred Hitchcock's classic horror-thriller 'Psycho' was the first American movie ever to show a toilet. It's also the first film where a toilet is heard flushing. The more you know!

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'Rosemary's Baby' (1968) -

Director Roman Polanski and lead actor John Cassavetes did not get along on the set of 'Rosemary's Baby.' Mia Farrow revealed in her 1997 autobiography 'What Falls Away' that the two men nearly got into a physical fight at one point. She wrote that they both had very different visions for the movie and there was a great deal of tension between them.

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'Night of the Living Dead' (1968) -

Director George Romero has been turning out zombie classics since the 1960s. In 2015, he found a film reel he thought had been lost forever. It contained around nine minutes of unseen footage from 'Night of the Living Dead' (1968), which included the longest zombie scene intended for the movie.

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Ed Gein -

Ed Gein was a notorious serial killer active in the US in the 1950s. He was convicted of murdering two women, as well as robbing bodies from graves and turning them into horrific trophies in his house. Gein was the inspiration for at least three of the most famous horror movie villains of all time.

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Ed Gein -

Gein is said to have been the inspiration for Hannibal Lector in 'The Silence of the Lambs' (1991), Leatherface in 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' (1974), and Norman Bates in 'Psycho' (1960). Any killer considered to be a combination of those three characters must be pretty damn scary...

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'Halloween' (1978) -

The creepy mask worn by Michael Myers in the movie 'Halloween' was never specified in the script. In the end, the costume designer bought a cheap latex mask at a toy store that was modeled after Captain Kirk from 'Star Trek' and painted it white.

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'The Babadook' (2014) -

The director of 'The Exorcist' (1973), William Friedkin, was terrified by 'The Babadook.' After watching it, he tweeted: "I've never seen a more terrifying film than 'The Babadook.' It will scare the hell out of you as it did me.”

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'The Blair Witch Project' (1999) -

The main three cast members of 'The Blair Witch Project' improvised their lines, and only received basic script guidelines through a kind of creepy scavenger hunt the same day of filming.

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'The Blair Witch Project' (1999) -

They had to use a GPS tracker to find their way to a crate located in the woods. The crates contained instructions for each of the actors, who couldn't share their instructions with each other. From that point, they started filming and improvising their lines while following the basic guidelines they'd received.

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'Paranormal Activity' (2007) -

The original 'Paranormal Activity' movie had such a low budget and such huge box-office success that it became one of the most profitable movies of all time.

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'The Blob' (1958) -

'The Blob' was supposedly based on true events. In 1950, two police officers reported that they saw a UFO that suddenly dissolved and fell from the sky. They rushed to the landing site and found a purple, jelly-like substance on the ground. The jelly mysteriously disappeared just before the FBI arrived to investigate...

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'The Silence of the Lambs' (1991) - Gene Hackman came very close to directing and starring in 'The Silence of the Lambs.' He even split the US$500,000 that the studio had to pay to get the rights to the book adaption, but he backed out at the last minute. Hackman had recently won an Oscar for another dark role and decided it was a bad career decision to play another unlikeable character so soon.

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'Child's Play' (1988) -

The 1988 movie 'Child's Play,' best known as the first in a series of films starring the horrifying killer doll called Chucky, was supposedly based on a true story!

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'Child's Play' (1988) -

Florida painter and author Robert Eugene Otto claimed that a family servant put a curse on one of his toys back in 1909. The toy was called Robert the Doll, and Robert is said to have changed locations by himself and conducted conversations. The family left Robert in the attic for years, and when a new family moved in in 1974, they also reported paranormal activity.

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'The Conjuring' (2013) -

Ed and Lorraine Warren, played by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson in 'The Conjuring,' were real-life paranormal investigators. In fact, the haunting the movie is based on is a real case that the ghost-busting couple actually worked on.

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'The Conjuring' (2013) -

The Warrens went out to help a family living in a Rhode Island farmhouse who were terrorized by ghostly sightings and other paranormal activity in 1971.

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'The Omen' (1976) -

The writer of 'The Omen,' David Seltzer, originally wanted to give the Antichrist child a different name. He wanted to call him Domlin, after a friend's child he thought was a “total obnoxious brat." His wife convinced him that it wasn't a good idea, and he went with Damien instead.

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'Creature from the Black Lagoon' (1954) -

Jack Arnold's 'Creature from the Black Lagoon' was actually based on the iconic gold Oscar statue! Arnold had recently been nominated for an Oscar when he was coming up with his next movie and had a little card with the Oscar statue printed on it on his desk.

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'Creature from the Black Lagoon' (1954) -

While coming up with his terrifying creature, he was unexpectedly inspired by the Oscar card. He told interviewers that he looked at it and thought, "If we put a gilled head on [the figurine], plus fins and scales, that would look pretty much like the kind of creature we’re trying to get."

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'The Craft' (1996) -

The makers of the cult classic 'The Craft' hired an actual witch to make the movie more realistic. A woman called Pat Devin was hired as a consultant. She was a member of the Covenant of the Goddess, one of the oldest Wiccan religious organizations in the US.

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'The Exorcist' (1973) -

Although it's never revealed in the film, the demon that possesses Regan MacNeil in 'The Exorcist' is called Pazuzu. Pazuzu is the name of the king of the demons in Assyrian and Babylonian mythology.

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'The Shining' (1980) -

Stephen King, the most famous horror author of all time, has had many of his books adapted into movies. 'The Shining' is perhaps the most successful and the most loved, but King himself was not a fan of the movie! In a 1983 interview, he said: "I’d admired [Stanley] Kubrick for a long time and had great expectations for the project, but I was deeply disappointed in the end result."

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'The Shining' (1980) -

There are rumors that Stanley Kubrick actually typed up the pages of Jack's terrifying manuscript himself. In one scene, Jack's wife looks at the pages of the book he's been working on and finds hundreds of pages with the words "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” printed over and over again. 

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'The Shining' (1980) - The prop department confirmed that the task wasn't given to them and the type seemed to have come from Kubrick's own typewriter. It's also clear that each line was typed by hand rather than put on an automatic setting, as there are typos and format changes on each page. Kubrick was a notoriously intense director, so it's not beyond the realms of possibility that he typed all of those pages himself.

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'Paranormal Activity' (2007) -

Steven Spielberg reportedly experienced some paranormal activity when he took home an early DVD copy of the movie 'Paranormal Activity.' His bedroom door supposedly locked by itself that night. Spielberg took the DVD back to the studio in a trash bag because he thought he was haunted! Nonetheless, he loved it and helped them come up with a new ending.

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'Carrie' (1976) -

The iconic final scene of the movie 'Carrie' shows the main character's undead hand shooting out of her freshly-dug grave. Lead actress Sissy Spacek insisted that her hand would be used for the scene, which meant she had to be buried alive!

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'The Silence of the Lambs' (1991) -

Buffalo Bill's famous dance scene in 'The Silence of the Lambs' wasn't in the script. Actor Ted Levine insisted it be included because it was in the original book, so he went ahead and did it!

Sources: (Mental Floss)

See also: Why we like horror movies, explained

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