The first horror movie that traumatised Neve Campbell: “Didn’t sleep for months”
After inviting an outsider into her coven in The Craft, Neve Campbell bagged the lead role of the resilient Sidney Prescott in one of horror’s most successful franchises, Scream, and became one of the genre’s ultimate final girls in the process.
While Sidney might be subjected to endless harassment and murder attempts courtesy of various Ghostface killers over the years, Campbell never plays her as a mere hapless victim, instead imbuing her with the strength to fight back and protect herself and her friends, while also not shying away from more vulnerable moments of grief and fear, which makes her loveable and, for many, relatable.
Injecting terrifying moments with a witty comeback or two (“It’s your turn to scream, asshole”), Campbell’s Sidney will always be her most defining and an icon of the horror genre, yet the actor has never actually been a big fan of watching scary movies, finding them too traumatising. Her dislike stems from a particularly unforgettable instance when she was a teenager and stumbled across a film that never left her mind, causing sleepless nights and offering plenty of nightmare fuel.
Talking to fellow scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis for Variety, the actor revealed how terrified she was of the 1980 supernatural film The Changeling when she was a teenager.
“I cannot watch horror movies. I can’t do it. I was 13 years old at a sleepover, it was called The Changeling with George C Scott. It’s a great movie but [I] didn’t sleep for months. Who does that to children?” she declared.
The Canadian film, directed by Peter Medak, follows a composer who believes the house he has moved into is haunted, and it’s this creepy, building exploration of not really being alone that really left an impression on Campbell.
I mean, the idea of ghosts haunting your home, no matter how friendly or nefarious, is a fear that many of us never fully grow out of, but it’s always heightened when you’re young, and watching The Changeling at that age is a recipe for disaster.
It’s widely considered one of the scariest horror movies ever made, with even Martin Scorsese saying it is “filled with sadness and dread” as it taps into grief and pain with the perfect amount of anger, fear, and emotion. The restless ghost at the heart of the film is a murdered child, who was drowned in a bathtub by his father, and it’s this troubled spirit, communicating with a man who has recently lost his own child, that makes for such an unnerving and harrowing experience; for a 13-year-old, watching this, the biggest takeaway is, of course, going to be pure horror.
Clearly, Campbell prefers something a little more lighthearted, which is perhaps why she is drawn to the comedy of Scream, which, as far as slasher franchises go, is not very scary at all.
