I’m sure you have heard the name Matthew Lillard. His face has been all over the internet, he’s also starring in the FNAF movie. In fact he has been in several movies. One of his first being the movie “Scream”.
He has stated fairly recently his grown dislike for horror movies, as well as acting in them. His reasoning was valid, but it was also a lie. If you ask him about why he has this aversion, he will either outright lie, or change the subject entirely. That’s because he can’t discuss it, open investigation and all. As well as how deeply and personally these events affected him.
This is the story about the making of the Stalking of Robert Anderson. The movie was to be pretty straight forward, a typical average man named Robert Anderson is being stalked. He is being stalked by an entity known as Legion, for they are many.
Throughout the course of the film, Roberts slowly goes mad and takes his own life. Matthew Lillard was set to play Roberts. But it was all fake, right? Surely this couldn’t have been a traumatizing experience for Matthew Lillard. I mean, he’s played a murderous high school student in the past.
Here’s where it gets messy, and dark, and insane. The director has a style similar to Stanley Kubrick in the shining. He had a specific way Matthew was to portray his character, and ensured Matthew was adequately able to play this role.
First he was expected to self isolate away from friends and family a whole month before filming. Second, he was to eat very little during this self imposed isolation, as well as attend eighteen hour long zoom meetings about the film. He was sleep deprived, tense, and isolated. His eyes began to look tired and blood shot on the third day.
By the time of filming he was a nervous wreck, but the director wasn’t finished with him yet. After each day of filming, Matthew had to stay in an old abandoned building with the rest of the cast, no privacy, no space.
He started to see things, his paranoia becoming more real each day. His co-star Samantha began to seriously worry about him. Her concerns were ignored but she was tasked to spend much more time with Matthew. This was not out of concern, but so Samantha would begin to truly feel the worry and fear her character was supposed to feel for her husband.
Then Matthew was genuinely being stalked, only exacerbating his paranoia and stress. The ending was supposed to be a snuff film, but someone found out and contacted the police.
It took a long time and several years of psychotherapy to recover from his experience, he’s likely still dealing with its after effects. The director was never found. Matthew Lillard, having been the only celebrity actor to work on the film, was kept entirely in the dark on everything. Including the director’s and actor’s real names.
The film had been scraped and no copy of it exists.