He may have made his feature debut in a classic horror movie, but having first-hand experience with things going bump in the night to an iconic extent didn’t mean that Johnny Depp had always been made of the sternest stuff when it came to watching films of a similar ilk.

Starring in a shlocker is a rite of passage for many actors at the beginning of their careers, and while plenty of future superstars scraped the bottom of the qualitative barrel in doing so, Depp bucked the trend by getting sucked into a bed and spat out as a geyser of blood in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Having ticked off that box early doors, he never really came into contact with straightforward horror all that often in the years to come. There have been exceptions to the rule, but Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate, the Hughes brothers’ From Hell, and Kevin Smith’s Tusk were among the very few outliers in Depp’s filmography.

Not that he’s a full-blown scaredy cat by any means, but Depp was nonetheless so troubled by a seminal psychological horror that he ended up suffering from an involuntary physical reaction. There’s a science to scary cinema designed to elicit those exact reactions from a captive audience, which, in a way, meant that one of the greatest British films ever made in any genre did its job and then some.

“One film that really scared me and I found very disturbing was not so much a horror film, but a Nicholas Roeg film, Don’t Look Now,” Depp told Spliced Wire. “That film really disturbed me. That’s the only film I think I’ve ever watched where some kind of horrible, involuntary noise flew out of my body. I was like, ‘Oh-ho!’. At one point in the movie, it was like, ‘Ahh-hahhh!’. It was one of these unexplainable noises.”

Fair enough, because he was far from the only person deeply affected by the 1973 classic. A troubling and traumatising rumination on grief, Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie’s John and Laura Baxter try their best to move forward with their lives following the death of their young daughter, but things hardly go according to plan.

An encounter with a clairvoyant who claims she can see their deceased child in the spirit world despite the fact that she’s blind in the physical plain plants seeds of doubt, hope, and danger in the grieving couple, culminating in one of the most famous twists ever committed to the screen.

Depp isn’t in the minority being disturbed by Don’t Look Now, something the movie has been wearing as a badge of honour for over half a century, with the narrative losing none of its power to shock, chill, and haunt viewers long after the credits roll.