According to The Hollywood Reporter, Corcoran agreed to the SAG minimum daily rate of $100 (when the film was shot in 2015), but negotiated for an additional “1% of profits generated from Terrifier,” including box office, streaming, live events, and merchandise. The franchise has generated more profit over the years than anyone could have foreseen. The three films that have been released thus far have generated around $100 million at the global box office on a combined budget of less than $2.5 million. The Universal Studios theme park even dedicated an entire house to Terrifier at its annual Halloween Horror Nights event this year.
Corcoran claims in her suit that she began receiving intermittent royalty payments after Terrifier 2 premiered in 2022, but that she’s only been paid around $8,300 so far. The filing states that when Corcoran confronted Leone and producer Phil Falcone, she was “brushed off” and was told the production “doesn’t keep records.” In addition to this breach of contract, Corcoran also alleges that the production violated SAG bylaws by declining to notify her that she’d be fully nude before shooting began; guild rules state that producers must obtain written consent from talent before filming such a sequence. “This case presents an all-too-common story of low budget film producers taking advantage of a young actress through fraud, sexual harassment and, ultimately, betrayal,” the complaint reads. In a separate statement, an attorney for Leone and Falcone said, “Damien and Phil deny the claims in the complaint and will vigorously defend this lawsuit.”
No matter how this case goes, Corcoran’s experience does sound genuinely harrowing. The complaint details a grueling environment in which the actor shot the scene in 40-second intervals across ten hours in what she previously told horror outlet Halloween Daily News was a “condemned building” in “below freezing” weather. She couldn’t be upside down for more than 40 seconds at a time to mitigate the effects of the blood pooling in her head, but the complaint states her doctor told her that she suffered cranial swelling and eardrum damage as a result of the shoot regardless.
“Were it not for Corcoran’s willingness to take a risk on this production and receive her compensation on the back-end, the series would not exist as it could not have been made on a shoe-string budget otherwise,” Devin McRae, a lawyer for Corcoran, wrote in the complaint. “However, when it came time to pay what was owed, the producers chose to cheat her.”
