Dangerous Animals director Sean Byrne discusses shooting the year’s most shocking scene, and reveals how it made his star Hassie Harrison faint.
Dangerous Animals is out now, and this twisted combination of Jaws and Longlegs is already one of the most acclaimed horror movies of the year.
In our 4-star Dangerous Animals review, we wrote that “Jai Courtney has never been better as the film’s deranged villain, while Hassie Harrison’s final girl is as kick-ass as they come, and does something that has to be seen to be believed in one of the movie moments of the year.”
We spoke to director Sean Byrne about the film’s conservation message, plus how Wolf Creek and Crocodile Dundee influenced his bad guy. While below Byrne discusses that aforementioned movie moment, so warning, MAJOR SPOILERS ahead.
Dangerous Animals director on shooting shocking scene
The scene in question occurs towards the end of the movie, when final girl Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is chained up in handcuffs. While desperately trying to escape, she endeavours to “de-glove” herself, Gerald’s Game-style.
When that doesn’t work, she thinks the unthinkable, and then follows through, breaking her thumb, and then biting if off, thereby facilitating her freedom.
It’s a tough scene to watch, and when I told Byrne that my eyes were closed for much of it, he said his cinematographer Shelley Farthing-Dawe struggles with it too. “Half the audience hide behind their hands,” says Byrne. “And the other half gleefully absorb it.”
Shooting the sequence sounds nearly as traumatic. “It was hard,” admits Byrne. “It was one of the last things we shot, and to have a chance of making a good film, everyone gives everything that they’ve got. Hassie was exhausted, and I think that was actually on the last day.
“You’ve got tubes of blood and she’s biting down on her finger, and I think she actually fainted at one stage. Because you’re also in a set that’s a hot cell. You’re in a safe occupational health and safety place that has the right amount of air pumping through, but it still gets hot when you’re in a contained space and you’re doing something that is that dramatically heavy. And she’s kind-of going for it psychologically as well.
“So I remember a take where her eyes started to roll and I was thinking ‘wow, this is an amazing piece of performance,’ and then she went kind-of woozy. And that was with the thumb in her mouth. It’s one of my favourite moments of the film because to me, I find it inspirational, when it could just have been treated as a horror movement. And she’s so great in that moment. But it comes from commitment. It doesn’t come for free.”
Dangerous Animals is out now. For more scary stuff, check out our list of the best horror movies of all-time and Dexerto’s favorite shark movies, as well as our picks for scariest TV shows ever.
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