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Anyone who’s ever seen Doctor Sleep — Mike Flanagan’s 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining — will remember the True Knot, a group of psychic vampires that causes all the trouble for Ewan McGregor’s Dan Torrance. As it turns out, they weren’t the scariest part of the movie for the people behind the camera… and what was the official scariest part was so bad that the studio almost pulled the plug.

“I played Silent Sarey, someone who's part of the True Knot,” Katie Parker revealed during the Haunting World of Mike Flanagan’s Flanaverse panel at Rose City Comic Con 2025. “Mike had Jacob Tremblay play the Baseball Boy, this little boy who the True Knot captures and then tortures to death, and I will never forget take one Jacob Tremblay did.”

What was so intense about that first take? The answer in two words: Jacob Tremblay.

“We were at this power plant. Rebecca Ferguson has this switchblade, a really creepy knife that she just cut him open, and we're all playing pretend, right?” Parker explained. “Jacob — he was nominated for an Oscar, so we knew we were in good hands, but I was like, 'He's a kid, you know, whatever.' Take one, that child went to a place that changed every person's cells on set, to the point where Mike sent the footage to Warner Brothers to watch the dailies, and they called panicked. They were like, ‘You have to stop. You can't make this film,’ because Jacob's performance was so real. Rebecca's hands started shaking. You just went to this place where it was like, ‘Oh God!’ One of our room operators threw up like it was so wild.”

Doctor Sleep is available to buy or rent... just in case you want to see a performance so scary that it almost got a movie cancelled mid-shoot.

In the immortal words of Danny Elfman, "Life's no fun without a good scare." Join Popverse's weekly explorations of the best opening moments of horror cinema in The Coldest Open, and then check out:

• The best horror movies of all time, according to horror aficionado Greg Silber
• The most underrated horror movies from the past couple years
• All the new and upcoming horror movies for 2025 and beyond

And much gore. Er, more. Much more.