Kristen Stewart and the ghost that haunted her worst movie: “I couldn’t make a sound”
Plenty of strange happenings have occurred during the filming of horror movies throughout cinema history, which makes you wonder if there really is some credibility in theories of ghosts and ghouls, or perhaps your senses are just heightened, your mind more active than normal when filming them.
If you are prone to believing in hauntings, the idea of ghosts stirring up trouble in retaliation during the filming of a movie based on real events is a pretty convincing theory.
Shooting a horror movie is always going to make an actor more susceptible to fear and paranoia in places they wouldn’t normally experience it, but it is possible that some entity is behind the curtains, overseeing the looming unease.
I mean, the rumour that, unbeknownst to the cast, real skeletons were used as props in Poltergeist, led to it being cursed, wherein four cast members died shortly after shooting concluded, had many suspect that some supernatural force was at work, and maybe there was. Meanwhile, tales on set of The Conjuring include Vera Farmiga finding claw marks on her laptop screen, and later, her thigh, Shanley Caswell convinced that she was being possessed, and Joey King developing a mysterious blood disorder that completely vanished when filming was done.
Coincidences happen, of course, but if ghosts are real, you can understand why they might want to torment someone who is bringing a fictionalised version of themselves to the big screen, meddling with their story and preventing them from resting in peace, and it’s something Kristen Stewart was faced with, quite literally, while making a horror film.
KStew, who has recently released her directorial debut The Chronology of Water, got her start as an actor, appearing in projects as a child before rising to prominence with the leading role of a quiet teenager caught in a supernatural love triangle of vampires and werewolves in Twilight.
However, shortly before that, she appeared in a scary movie called The Messengers, and it was during filming that she experienced what she believed to be a ghost encounter, revealing on the Ghosted podcast that while she was staying in an old hotel, she was confused by a water bottle falling over on its own accord, but it was after she went to bed that the real frightening physical experience manifested.
“And then all of a sudden I felt like my legs had been kind of pushed down. ‘Cause they were up, like, my knees were up,” she said, adding, “So it made me open my eyes, and when I opened my eyes, it was a lady in colonial garb. There was a lady in old-school clothes, with darkened features and rollers in her hair, and sort of looming over my bed, as high as the top of the drapery. I couldn’t make a sound for a very long time.”
Perhaps the then-15-year-old Stewart was experiencing sleep paralysis or some incredibly vivid dream, or maybe she really did get a visit from a long-deceased woman, but it’s all very coincidental that the experience took place when filming a horror movie, and it’s very likely that she simply let her imagination run amok in the old digs. But then again, can we ever really be sure that the ghost wasn’t tormenting Stewart for starring in such a bad movie?
