"I'd never watch a horror film, but after I found out I was going to be in one, I watched, like, four of them, including The Shining, I was terrified - I couldn't sleep for days. But I wanted to get myself used to things I was going to see on the set"
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There’s something disarmingly human about an actor admitting she basically speed-ran trauma prep for a job. Jennifer Love Hewitt frames horror not as a genre she enjoys, but as an environment she has to survive professionally. The little verbal tics - “like,” “four of them” - do real work here: they keep the story in the register of confession, not branding. She isn’t positioning herself as a hardened scream queen; she’s staging the opposite, a reluctant recruit who still chooses to enlist.
The subtext is craft-through-exposure therapy. She’s describing a do-it-yourself method acting, minus the pretension: if the set is going to throw uncanny images and jolts at you, your body needs rehearsal as much as your lines do. That’s why the anecdote pivots from vulnerability (“I couldn’t sleep for days”) to control (“I wanted to get myself used to things”). Fear becomes a skill to be trained, not merely endured.
Context matters: a late-’90s/early-2000s star navigating a genre that often treats young actresses as raw material - faces to terrorize, bodies to chase. Her strategy reads as self-protection and professionalism at once. She claims agency in a machine designed to startle her. The punchline isn’t that horror scared her; it’s that she showed up anyway, trying to domesticate fear before fear could domesticate her.
The subtext is craft-through-exposure therapy. She’s describing a do-it-yourself method acting, minus the pretension: if the set is going to throw uncanny images and jolts at you, your body needs rehearsal as much as your lines do. That’s why the anecdote pivots from vulnerability (“I couldn’t sleep for days”) to control (“I wanted to get myself used to things”). Fear becomes a skill to be trained, not merely endured.
Context matters: a late-’90s/early-2000s star navigating a genre that often treats young actresses as raw material - faces to terrorize, bodies to chase. Her strategy reads as self-protection and professionalism at once. She claims agency in a machine designed to startle her. The punchline isn’t that horror scared her; it’s that she showed up anyway, trying to domesticate fear before fear could domesticate her.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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