10 Most Dangerous Movies in History

Movies often depict all sorts of dangers on screen, whether it's gunfire, explosions, zombies, or even evil leprechauns making terrible puns. However, filming these movies should be pretty safe. You don't expect to get hurt or even killed while filming a movie.

Unfortunately, it happens. Whether due to carelessness, incompetence, or just plain indifference, some film productions have proven downright dangerous, even deadly.

10. Across the border

We have to start at the very beginning, with the earliest known death to occur during filming in the United States, and in fact we're dealing with not one fatality, but two.

It was back in 1914, before Hollywood became the center of American filmmaking. The Colorado Motion Picture Company was making a Western called"Across the Border" , using the section of the Arkansas River in Cañon City, Colorado, as a substitute for the Rio Grande. Their leading lady was Grace Forman, professionally known as Grace McHugh .

At one point, McHugh had to cross the river on horseback, but her horse stumbled and she fell into the water and immediately headed downstream. A brave cameraman named Owen Carter jumped to her aid, but although he was a good swimmer and the river was only a few feet deep, the current was so strong that it carried them both to their deaths. It was only several days later that their bodies were discovered miles from where they had disappeared.

9. Conqueror

Epic "Conqueror" 1956 remember by two reasons . First, because it features one of, if not the most, famous blunders in Hollywood history—John Wayne playing the 13th-century Mongol warlord Genghis Khan. Another, far more serious and controversial, is that the film was partially shot in Utah’s Escalante Desert, downwind from a nuclear test site. The cast and crew were exposed to nuclear fallout that could have had adverse effects on their health and even killed some of them.

John Wayne himself died of cancer. So did the film's leading lady, Susan Hayward, and director Dick Powell. According to According to a 1980 report, 91 of the 220 cast and crew members developed cancer, 46 of whom died from it. This is because Conqueror ?

This is where the controversy comes in, because there is no consensus. Some argue that the cancer rate was in line with the national average. John Wayne, in particular, was not surprising, since he smoked several packs a day. But other medical experts believe that out of a group of 220 people, you would only expect about 30 cases. Then there are all the native Paiutes who worked as extras and were not counted in the total, and special cases, like the actor Pedro Armendariz , who committed suicide after learning he had terminal cancer, so he didn't count either.

Production "The Conqueror" highlighted a much more serious problem, namely the problem of downwinders—entire communities that lived downwind of nuclear test sites and were exposed to dangerous radioactive fallout and its impact on their health—a problem that remains far from resolved.

8. Noah's Ark

In 1928, when the film industry was just beginning to transition from the silent era to "talkies," Warner Bros. wanted to make a success of a partial talkie, that is, a silent film that included some scenes with sound. They chose an epic disaster film that was a modern retelling of the story of Noah's Ark called, you guessed it, Noah's Ark . To direct, the studio hired a young and inexperienced director named Michael Curtiz, who was still a decade and a half away from winning an Oscar for best direction for film "Casablanca" .

Curtis understood the task before him. Make it epic! Don't be afraid to splash out! As the poster for the film said, it was to be "a spectacle for the ages ".

As you might expect, in a film called "Noah's Ark" will scene of the Great Flood . Since the studio wanted something big, Curtis balked at suggestions to use miniatures and instead decided to make it as authentic as possible. So to film the flood scene that was supposed to be the film's climax, the director used dozens of extras and a reported 600,000 gallons of water to simulate the biblical catastrophe.

Predictably, the film crew had little control over the overwhelming flow of water. Three extras are said to have drowned During the scene, another had to have his leg amputated, and dozens of others suffered broken bones and other injuries. However, this may be a Hollywood legend, as the true scale of the human toll has never been properly documented. However, one thing was certain. After "Noah's Ark » Hollywood has introduced new stunt safety rules to ensure that a scene like this never happens again.

7. Rust

This is the latest entry on this list, showing that while safety standards in film production have improved, they are still far from perfect. On October 21, 2021, during the filming of the movie Rust" actor Alec Baldwin used the revolver as a prop, except it contained a live round and went off, hitting cinematographer Halina Hutchins, who died in hospital later that day.

The New Mexico Bureau of Occupational Safety and Health has fined a manufacturing company the maximum $137,000 for multiple safety violations, including ignoring two misfires , which occurred before the fatal shooting. Meanwhile, the official police report included testimony from several members of the film crew who claimed that they were witnesses examples of negligence involving weapons on film sets.

Since this is a recent event, some investigations and numerous lawsuits arising from the tragedy are still ongoing as authorities try to determine who is at fault for the accident.

6. Midnight Rider: The Gregg Allman Story

One common thread you'll notice in most of these stories is that almost no one is punished. Studios and production companies pay civil lawsuits, but that's about it. That changed in 2015, when director Randall Miller became the first American film director in the story, who actually went to prison for a death related to the film.

His sentence was related to his role in the unfinished 2014 biographical drama " Midnight Rider: The Gregg Allman Story " starring William Hurt. On February 20, 2014, some of the cast and crew were testing a camera on a railroad trestle overlooking the Altamaha River. They thought it was abandoned, but it wasn't, and as a freight train came around the corner, the crew had less than a minute to get out of the way. It essentially turned into a scene from "Stay with me" , but not everyone made it in time. The twenty-seven-year-old assistant operator Sarah Jones was struck and killed by a train, and dozens of others were injured. In the subsequent investigation, blame was often shifted as it became unclear who knew the railroad was still in use and who had obtained the proper permits to use it for filming. Eventually, director Randall Miller pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to two years in prison plus eight years of probation.

5. Fitzcarraldo

Let's say you decide to make a film inspired by a real-life event from the 19th century, when some rich, eccentric industrialist decided to get a steamboat across an isthmus by dismantling it and dragging it overland from one river to another in the jungles of Peru. Do you A) use a model and perhaps shoot in a studio because it's much easier and safer, or do you B) head out into the jungles of Peru and insist on using a real steamboat? If you're Werner Herzog, the answer is B, but that's only the beginning of the production problems for his 1982 epic, "Fitzcarraldo." 

Firstly, the Duke's ship weighed 320 tons, which was almost 11 times heavier than the actual steamship used a century earlier. The original ship was also cut into more than a dozen pieces to make it easier to transport, but the director insisted on keeping his ship intact because it looked better on camera. To accomplish this feat, Herzog hired more thousands of local extras as workers.

Given the large number of people involved in the production, and the fact that much of it took place in the remote Peruvian jungle, some deaths due to disease were inevitable. But some of the other “accidents” involved a mob raid amahuaca , where one man was shot in the neck with an arrow and his wife in the stomach, two plane crashes, one canoe that sank and, most horrifyingly, self-amputation, when a logger was bitten by a snake and had to cut off his own leg with a chainsaw.

4. Crow

Perhaps the most famous death to occur during filming was the accidental death of Brandon Lee on the set of the 1994 dark fantasy Crow" After all, while death on a film set does happen from time to time, the death of a film's protagonist is a much rarer event.

On March 31, 1993, while filming a scene, Brandon Lee walked into the room where another actor shot him with what was supposed to be a blank. To everyone's horror, Lee immediately passed out with the .44 Magnum bullet lodged in his abdomen and died in the hospital a few hours later.

His death was due to careless Firearms handling. The gun that fired the fatal shot was used in several scenes, sometimes with dummy cartridges and sometimes with blanks. A dummy cartridge looks exactly like the real thing, except that it does not contain gunpowder or a primer, so it is inert. Because it looks more realistic, it is often used in close-ups, whereas a blank is the opposite - it has gunpowder and a primer, but no bullet. So it gives you the flash and explosion without the projectile.

In an effort to save money, the film crew made their own cartridge mockups with real bullets, but they didn't do a very good job of it. They got rid of the gunpowder but left the primer in. Then, during filming, the primer fired with enough force to force the bullet into the barrel. Finally, during the fatal scene, the gun was loaded with blanks that had the same power as the real thing, and the two together acted like one very real and very deadly shot.

3. Roar

Movie "Roar" was supposed to be a lighthearted adventure comedy with a well-intentioned message about preserving African wildlife. However, the funniest thing about the film, albeit unintentionally, was the title card at the beginning, which proudly proclaimed that " no animals were harmed during its production."

It was true, but it said nothing about people, although... and for good reason. "Roar" sometimes called " the most dangerous film ever made." Ratings Estimates of how many people were injured on set are all over the place, but they appear to include at least 70 cast and crew members, and possibly more than 100. And keep in mind, that's in terms of different people, not different injuries. Many on set suffered multiple injuries, sometimes on the same day of filming, and the movie was intentionally shot with non-union talent to get around those pesky safety rules.

What exactly made this film so dangerous? Well, that's easy — it involved over a hundred wild animals, mostly big cats, and very few people to keep them in check. Miraculously, no one died during production, so it didn't get any higher, but the cornucopia of injuries ran the gamut from one extreme to the other. Some suffered only minor scratches or bites, while actress Melanie Griffith required reconstructive surgery after a lioness injured her face and a cameraman Jan de Bont received 120 stitches in his head after one of the big cats partially scalped him.

2. Such men are dangerous.

Nowadays, a film from 1930 "Such men are dangerous" is almost forgotten. There are a few memorable fun facts about it - it was directed by Kenneth Hawks, brother of the famous classic Hollywood director Howard Hawks, and starred a pre-Dracula Bela Lugosi. Another not-so-fun fact is that even today it remains the worst plane crash in movie history.

On January 2, 1930, three planes carrying eleven men took off from San Pedro to film a flying scene off the coast of Southern California. Only one plane with a pilot and a stuntman by Fred Osborne came back. The other two suffered from mid-air collisions , which killed all ten people on board, including director Kenneth Hawks, an assistant director, four cameramen, two pilots and two prop men.

Only five bodies were found, and the exact cause of the crash remains a mystery.

1. The Twilight Zone Movie

It's hard to imagine a more dangerous film than one in which five people, including the director, were charged with multiple counts of manslaughter.

In the early 1980s, producers Steven Spielberg and John Landis wanted to make a film version of the mind-blowing sci-fi horror series "Twilight Zone" It was an anthology consisting of four separate parts, each directed by a different director.

The clip, directed by John Landis, showed the actor Vika Morrow as a bitter racist who blamed all of his woes on Jews, blacks, and Asians. He's then transported to various points in time, including Nazi-occupied France, rural Alabama, and the Vietnam War, where he's mistaken for each of the minorities he despised so he can experience their suffering firsthand.

The tragedy occurred during filming of the Vietnam War scenes when Morrow and two child actors, Renee Shin Chen and Myka Dinh Le, were supposed to escape from a pursuing helicopter. However, due to all the pyrotechnics, the pilot lost control and at first crashed into the blades of three actors, killing them instantly in one of the most gruesome ways imaginable.

Landis, plus an assistant producer, a pyrotechnician, a production manager and a pilot, were all charged with manslaughter, though they were all eventually found not guilty. innocent ".