This Was the Only Horror Movie Maine’s Stephen King Admits He Was Too Scared to Finish

The king of horror himself, scared of a movie? Talk about a compliment.

This is the master himself, who has terrorized millions of people with 50 years of nightmare-induced novels-turned-movies like Carrie, The Shining, Misery, and IT.

I guess at the end of the day, Stephen is human too. While I’ve only seen a few of his movies (and in some cases had to leave the room, not finish them, and just research how they ended), Stephen has one movie he couldn’t finish either, because he was too freaked out, according to Slash Film.

Back in 1999, Stephen was walking near his home in North Lovell, Maine, when a distracted driver hit him. He spent a month recovering at Central Maine Hospital. That’s when his son brought him a VHS copy of The Blair Witch Project. According to Slash Film, he had to turn the film off halfway through because he was too scared.

One thing about “Blair Witch:” the damn thing looks real. Another thing about “Blair Witch:” the damn thing feels real. And because it does, it’s like the worst nightmare you ever had, the one you woke from gasping and crying with relief because you thought you were buried alive and it turned out the cat jumped up on your bed and went to sleep on your chest.

The Blair Witch Project was shot on a handheld camcorder in a “found footage” documentary style for just $60,000.  Artisan Entertainment bought it for more than a million bucks right after it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and the rest is horror movie history.

It’s about three student filmmakers who go into the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland. They disappear, but their equipment and footage are discovered a year later, and the found footage is the movie we see.

READ ON: Stephen King Wishes He’d Made This Edge-of-Your-Seat Movie

Yes, it’s fiction. However it didn’t look like fiction, and according to the Indy100 website, the marketing was so convincing with its documentary-gone-wrong campaign that most people, including myself, thought it was a true story.

Stephen did finally finish The Blair Witch Project after he was out of the hospital, admitting that was the only time he couldn’t finish a horror film the first time through.

This post was originally published on here