4 Actors on Starring in a Horror Movie As a Kid
1. Alex Vincent: Child’s Play, Child’s Play 2
Chucky, the killer doll at the center of the 1988 classic Child’s Play, may have inspired you to stuff your Kid Sister in the closet, but he didn’t torment his co-star, Alex Vincent, who first played Andy when he was 6 years old, quite so much. Chucky was, after all, only a puppet - or so Alex, now 35 and running his own Florida-based recording studio (AV Productions), will try to convince you.
What was your audition like?
I auditioned in New York City as I did for a lot of things between 5 and 13 years old. I didn’t get that many films early on - it was a lot of commercials - so I was excited about the audition to begin with. Then I got a callback for it and I got a second callback, and then they called me out to L.A. It was kind of a high-pressure situation, and we were doing the scene where I had to say the line, “Aunt Maggie was a real bitch and she got what she deserved.”
Was that your first time saying "bitch"?
Yeah, and my mother was in the audition room and I didn’t want to swear in front of her, so when we got to that part, I froze up and pretended I didn’t remember the words. So we started over, and I froze up again and then ran and locked myself in the bathroom. My mother came to get me and I said, “I can’t say that word in front of you.” So we replaced it with something else for [the time being].
Did Tom Holland [the director] or the producers have to talk to your mom about whether you’d be troubled by any of the content?
They talked to her about it, but it was never really much of concern because I knew the difference between real and fake. [Chucky] was an incredibly cool, expensive electronic puppet that had wires comes out from underneath him. And to try to get the doll to look real or alive meant doing a lot of takes. Most of those scenes we did, like, 30, 40 times in a row. There was no fear.
For some reason, they didn’t want me to see the burnt-up Chucky at the end. They thought that image would be a little too graphic. But besides that, they pretty much stuck me in every position that Andy was in without some pretense other than “a doll was trying to kill me.”
Were they concerned about the fire scene because that was actually a stunt double, Ed Gale?
Yeah, he was a friend of mine, so I didn’t want to see the scene where they set him on fire. After I tossed that match in, I wasn’t there.
So you were close with Ed?
Oh yeah, we got along really well. Me and him and Catherine Hicks [who played Andy’s mom] and Chris Sarandon [who played the cop] all got along really well. And Catherine hadn’t played a mother before, so she really got to know me and took the time to make a connection with me.
My favorite behind-the-scenes story is that she married Kevin Yagher, the guy who designed Chucky.
Correct. She met him on the set.
Were you too young to notice a spark between them?
Oh no, I wasn’t too young at all. She wouldn’t stop talking about him!
You mentioned that she put in some work to get to know you. What did you guys do together?
We’d go out and have lunch together, [she’d] take me to McDonald’s. There was this little pearl bead that fell off a necklace or something, and someone found it in the lady’s room - it might have been my acting coach - and gave it to her and told her to give it me and tell me that this was a magic ball. I’m not sure what powers it had, exactly, but it was designed to make some sort of connection with us. And it worked - not that I thought it was magic, I was brighter than that - but I saved it. I still have it to this day.
Did you make much money off the movie?
No, not really.
Does that bother you now in hindsight?
No, because it would’ve been spent whether it was a lot of money or a little money. It was 30 years ago. Money doesn’t last. The residuals of these movies pay off for me all the time because I make appearances at horror conventions and haunted houses and movie screenings and pop culture conventions and things like that. I do 12 or 15 of those a year, and over the years I’ve made a lot more money doing that than I did for the film itself.
At what point does Child’s Play come up when you’re starting to date someone? First date? Third date?
I’m not really the most social person in the world, so it’s pretty rare that I meet someone that doesn’t know that already. But in general, I don’t really hold off on it. I don’t lead with that information, but I don’t hold off on it either. They’re going to find out if my whole life is very much still based around what I did when I was 6 years old, as far as conventions that I’m doing all the time. I leave sometimes six weekends in a row doing these appearances. So anyone in my life is pretty aware of my past.
Is that bizarre to you?
It would be if that’s not all I knew. As far as meeting people, I meet people a lot at conventions and I’ve been able to start relationships with people in that capacity. The truth is that the Andy thing will wear off real fast. If I wasn’t able to sustain your interest for any other reason besides that, it would never go anywhere.
Did you keep anything from set?
I had a couple of things, like some wardrobe and the Good Guy cereal box from first scene. But I’ve actually sold a lot of the stuff, not just because I needed the money - which, of course, I did - but it sat in my attic or in my basement. It’s not something I want to just display. And Chucky is so present in my life that I don’t need any reminders. I was never given an actual doll from the set and I do kind of wish that I had one. I would display him. But outside of that, I’m not making a shrine to myself in my Chucky days.
2. David Dorfman: The Ring, The Ring Two, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
He was no Samara, but 11-year-old David Dorfman (now 23) was unsettling in his own right as Aidan, the boy with the eerie stare who looked like he never slept - perhaps because he was waking up in the middle of the night to watch forbidden VHS tapes, giving his already doomed mother (Naomi Watts) just seven days to save him. He also gave you the willies as hillbilly Jedidiah in the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Were you anything like Aidan as a kid? He’s a little bit quiet, pensive, weird.
I’d say yes and no to that. On one hand, I guess I was a bit mature for my age like Aidan. On the other hand, the real me as a kid was always joking, way more outdoorsy.
How did you wind up doing horror?
I guess life just takes its course. I do have a particular love of the horror genre so it worked out perfectly in that sense. I actually did this project when I was really young, Panic, where I’m basically a hit-man in training. So doing really dark, above-my-age kind of stuff was apparently a theme. But if you want to hear, some really crazy stuff happened when they were doing the [Ring] sequel.
Yes, do tell.
On the sequel, they had the pre-production studio at Universal, and the office space completely flooded. Like, for the first time in a hundred years of the Universal campus, it completely flooded. And, you know if you’ve seen the sequel, water and sweating is a very central concept. It was like, OK, either this is the best prank ever, or worst prank ever - or, you know, something’s going on here. The director on that one, Hideo [Nakata], who’s absolutely fantastic, he actually brought out a group of monks essentially to sanctify the space.
And then you had to get fake-drowned in a bathtub. Were you freaked out?
You know, I’d actually say a scarier moment was on Texas Chainsaw. Spoiler alert: My character, Jedidiah, really saves the day, rescuing people from Leatherface. And there’s a chainsaw right up, really close to me, and if we want to talk about a moment on set where I actually had reason to feel scared, "chainsaw very close to you" is about as good of a reason as you’re going to get. I was really grateful there wasn’t a headline, “Young Actor Medevaced From Rural Texas.”
Where were you shooting in Texas?
That was done near Austin. Actually, even though we were shooting way out in this beautiful part of hill country, we were staying at a nice hotel in downtown Austin, and every day, I’d come back to this nice hotel in some ritzy tower, and everyone would just be staring at me in the elevator, like, “What is this?” “What is going on here?” Someone should have done a candid camera segment of returning to the hotel every night.
Those teeth!
Putting on those teeth was an interesting experience; they took quite awhile to get in place. I would just sit there watching DVDs as the makeup people did it.
You wound up going to UCLA when you were 13. How did that happen?
You know I’ve always been eager to challenge myself, so that was the basic motivation. I wanted to learn.
And you went to Harvard Law School. Do you practice law now?
Yeah. I graduated Harvard Law at 21 with highest honors and it was an unbelievably amazing experience. And I was equally grateful to pass the bar on my first try and I’m completely licensed now. I’m the architect of the first piece of motion-picture tax credit legislation in the Philippines. I got to help out on the Boston Marathon bombing prosecution, did a lot of other terrorism cases. Now I’m practicing in a large firm in Hong Kong.
3. Lindsey Haun: Village of the Damned (1995)
Lindsey Haun played Mara, the leader of a pack of white-haired demon children - all conceived during a blackout - in horror king John Carpenter’s 1995 remake. The kids, who moved in unison, could read minds but were lacking in the emotions department. As the dialogue reminded you many times, they were incapable of feeling empathy. They also killed people just by looking at them. You’ve since seen Haun, now 31, in Shrooms and True Blood.
What was your audition like - you were 9, right?
Yeah, I was 9. It was intense! The kids were crying in the waiting room because the words were really hard to memorize. We were reading people’s minds with an adult vocabulary, there was sometimes three pages of monologue.
And then once you got the part, you had even more lines. Was that a lot of pressure?
Yeah, it was just intense drilling. Constant memorizing. It was a lot of me in my trailer while all the kids were outside playing. And that was frustrating. I remember that being really annoying. I just wanted to play with everybody.
How do you get into character as an evil demon when you’re that young? Were you channeling a mean girl from school?
I watched horror movies way too young and one of my favorite horror movies was The Shining. Jack Nicholson’s character in that just bore a hole in my brain, his weird, maniacal controlled stuff. Obviously Mara wasn’t an alcoholic and didn’t have emotional, crazy outbursts. She was very non-emotional. But it was that sort of evil that I was tapping into.
When did you get to see the finished movie? Did you have to wait until you were older - I guess not, since you had already seen The Shining by then.
Yeah, actually, I don’t know why anybody thought this was a good idea, but opening day, we took my Girl Scout troop to go see it at Universal City Walk and it was very traumatizing for the kids. I remember that somebody, I don’t know who, made an announcement that I was sitting in the audience and then when I left the theater, everybody who was in the audience stood up and clapped and made a tunnel for me to walk out. I remember it being really weird for my Girl Scout troop.
Did you creep them out?
I think it changes [people] when they see that maybe that you’re capable of that kind of coldness. Like when I did the movie Shrooms, I had somebody come up to me at the end of a screening - spoiler alert, I’m the murderer in that movie - and he was like, “You must have something inside of you, how did you tap into that?” And I was like, “It’s acting. I don’t know what to tell you man, I’m not a murderer!”
Did you ever use that to your advantage though, the fact that you knew you could scare people?
I did. One of my best friends, she would come over for sleepovers and we would be watching a movie and I would just start staring at her and I would wait for her to turn and see me and she hated it. I feel so bad now, but at the time I thought it was the funniest thing.
In the movie, Mara is using that stare to kill people. Were you aware of that?
Oh yeah, I definitely knew what I was doing. I have this pretty clear memory of us watching them do the [scene] where the janitor falls on the broom, because I think John [Carpenter] wanted us to see how they did it, how unreal it was. I remember going up to the dummy and poking it with my finger and seeing that it was foam and seeing that the blood on it was a weird, sticky sugar water. It takes the power out of the scary images.
I was surprised to read that you guys weren’t wearing wigs. Did the bleaching fry your hair?
It didn’t - I have blonde hair naturally. And it didn’t fry Thomas Dekker’s hair [he played David]. But everybody else had dark hair and their mothers secretly took them all to get hot oil treatments even though they were told not to do that - it would make the hair too heavy. Immediately whole chunks of the girls’ hair fell out. The whole crown of one of the girl’s hair fell out. And it was painful.
I don’t mean to throw anybody under the bus here, but in the contract, they left in that they could bleach the hair but they told us all that it was going to be wigs. Or at least that’s what they told my reps and my mom. My mom was like, “You can’t bleach kids’ hair.” And they were like, “Yeah, yeah, we’re just leaving it in the contract. But don’t worry about it, we’re definitely going to have wigs when you get up here.” And then we went up and they were like, “Actually, we changed our minds.” And so the bleaching process wasn’t fun. Some of the girls who had brown hair had blisters on their scalps, which I think is part of the reason their moms took them to get hot oil treatments - they were thinking that they were soothing their scalps. It was really, really frustrating that when the movie came out the reviews were like, "Oh, and these obviously synthetic wigs..."
You actually read the reviews? At that age?
Yeah, I know. Terrible. I didn’t read all of them. My parents tried to shield me from the Siskel & Ebert review, and then some child actor’s mother taped it and handed it to my mom in front of me, and for some reason I loved Siskel & Ebert - I was a weird movie-geek kid - and I was like, “Oh my god! Siskel & Ebert!” And my mom was like, “We’re not going to watch this. It’s not a nice review.” And I was heartbroken. I could never watch Siskel & Ebert after that!
It sounds like that other mom was being a bitch.
It does kind of, doesn’t it? Hollywood is weird, man. The child-actor world is the weirdest. But somehow I survived.
Do you credit your mom for that?
Yeah. Now that I’m an adult and we have some distance from it, I think she regrets some decisions that she made and wishes that she had been stronger in some ways. I know that she wishes that she didn’t let them bleach my hair and I know that she has regrets about getting me in the industry at all. But it’s cool that we can have those kinds of conversations.
Do you have regrets about starting so young?
No. There are definitely things that aren’t the healthiest about my experience. There’s something to be said about being aware of yourself as a product at a young age. It’s something I think about a lot and that I try to heal myself from if I find anything that is a wound or a scar or something that makes me, you know, a difficult person to deal with. But we all have that stuff that makes us weirdoes, and I’m definitely a weirdo.
4. Miko Hughes: Pet Sematary, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
Miko Hughes was only 3 when he played killer back-from-the-dead baby Gage in Pet Sematary, so he doesn’t remember slashing Jud’s Achilles heel or what have you. But the now 30-year-old convention staple does remember his other creepy role as Heather Langenkamp’s occasionally Freddy-possessed son in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. And on a lighter note, yes, he did have a crush on the Olsens when he appeared on Full House.
You don’t remember shooting Pet Sematary, but do you remember watching it for the first time? How old were you?
I had seen parts of it growing up. I was about 12 the first time I sat down and watched the whole thing start to finish. I think the Zelda part scared me the most. None of the parts with me [in them] scared me. It’s almost like watching old home-movies of yourself - kind of an odd, surreal thing.
New Nightmare you actually remember shooting - are the memories happy or traumatizing?
New Nightmare was my favorite film I ever worked on, just from a shooting standpoint. I have so many happy memories from that set. But there was a part that I actually got really scared. They didn’t tell me that Freddy was going to pop out [in the hell scene at the end], I guess to get a good reaction. It ended up scaring me too much. But in general, working on a horror movie is no different than working on any movie. Turn the camera around and there’s 20, 30 people standing around, eating doughnuts, smoking cigarettes between takes, working, like any other set.
Did you get to watch the other Nightmare on Elm Street movies to prepare for your role, or did your parents nix that idea?
I think we rented the very first one, just so I would have the basis for it. But I didn’t watch the entirety of the series until years later. But I definitely knew who Freddy was and was a fan.
According to your Instagram, you have a girlfriend. Did she know about your horror movie roles when you got together?
Not initially. And I think maybe that’s why I liked her.
Does that normally stand in your way, dating-wise?
I guess it’s a blessing and a curse. When I was single and on Tinder, that was a good little “Hey, did you ever see this movie?” thing. I would never bring it up myself, but if they mentioned it, then cool, that could work for me. But then on the other hand, if they’re like a superfan, that could be weird if that’s all they’re seeing. They think of you as that character more than who you actually are.
Have you ever had a stalker?
I had some pretty weird fan mail growing up, sometimes from prison and wherever else. Nothing too intense. Some superfans that maybe went a little overboard with gifts and whatnot, expecting something other than what it could be with a kid. That’s a little weird. But at the same time, it’s like, "Hey, I’m getting free video games. I’m not going to return it if you sent it!" Thankfully we never felt unsafe.
What do you get recognized most for, including your non-horror work?
Full House, sometimes Mercury Rising. I don’t understand how some people can recognize me from Pet Sematary. That’s really shocking when people come at me with that one.
When’s the last time you saw an Olsen twin?
Man, I was probably, like, 10, 11. It was in New York at some fashion show event thing. It was a long time ago.
Did you have a crush on them?
Oh, I definitely had a crush on them. They were pretty sheltered. I didn’t get to hang with them too much. They were nice, the times we did hang out. But I wasn’t old enough to have, like, a cell phone to be like, “Hey, let’s stay in touch!” So that didn’t really play out. Everybody keeps asking me on Twitter if anything was going to happen with Fuller House, but I kind of doubt it unless the Olsens come back, because myself and all their other little crew of friends are pretty specifically linked to them.
Maybe since you had an antagonist relationship with Uncle Jesse, he could be your way in?
Yeah, I think I tweeted him when the show came out and I called him - what did I call him on the show? Uncle Monkey Head or something like that? I might’ve deleted it.
Why did you delete it?
I don’t know. Because then when I read it later … I probably just overthought it. I was like, “If he doesn’t get the reference, he’s going to think I’m just being a jerk.”
Do you pay attention to the “Where are they now?” type posts on the internet? BuzzFeed did one on you, for example. Do you ever feel objectified by those?
Yeah, I do. It’s bittersweet because I struggle with, “Is that all I’ll ever be? That’s all people are going to think of me?” I get it though, because that’s their frame of reference and it’s not like they need to bother asking about anything else. That was an iconic thing that a lot people have an association with. I can’t complain, you know?
You directed a segment in a horror anthology. Is there more directing in your future? What’s next?
I was really lucky to have an opportunity to direct. It kind of fell into my lap before I was really prepared, which was nice, but I feel like I could’ve done a lot more in retrospect. So if I do direct again, I’m going to do my homework. Now I’m taking some classes, I’m going to school for film, and I think I’m going to end up back in the industry in one capacity or another. I’m not sure where just yet. I kind of stepped away from it for a few years. I thought I was done with it. But I grew up in it. It’s such a big part of my life.
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