Month: November 2020

Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend was the first horror movie that I watched as a kid from beginning to end. I might have been eight or nine. I vividly remember choosing the movie at the video store and feeling so daring to be choosing a horror movie. I’m not sure, but I think I was with my older brother or a babysitter because I don’t think either of my parents would have allowed me to watch it.

The basketball stood out as the part of the movie I would never forget. The actress who played the undead main character, Kristy Swanson, said that she had probably thrown the basketball over a hundred times during the re-shoot filming of Elvira’s death scene. She said, “Wes Craven kept at me to throw it as hard as I could to indicate great speed. I must have tossed that ball a hundred times. My arm sure felt I did.” She also said in an interview with Maxim magazine in May 2000 that the fake head was stuffed with actual cow brains that the production crew picked up from a butcher shop.

Learn more about the movie at IMDb Trivia: Deadly Friend.

Craven, Wes. Deadly Friend, Warner Bros., 1986.