Chilean actress Lorenza Izzo was nearly killed while filming The Green Inferno. The movie, which was released in 2015, is a cannibal horror flick directed by Eli Roth of Hostel fame. Roth made the movie to pay homage to the Italian cannibal films of the 1970s and '80s. In the movie, Izzo plays the starring role of Justine, a college freshman who joins a student social activism group that decided to go on a trip to the Amazon rainforest to save a village threatened by deforestation efforts.
The plot centers on Justine and the rest of the group of activists as they go on the trip. After an intense protest they get on a plane to leave, but an accident happens and the plane crashes. The survivors land in the jungle - and get captured by a tribe of cannibals. Critics gave the movie mixed reviews, but horror author Stephen King praised it, calling it "a glorious throwback" to the drive-in movies of his youth, which were "hard to watch, but you can't look away."
At one point in the horror movie, there is a scene that takes place on the Amazon River itself. After the plane crashes, the cannibal tribe members shoot the survivors with darts, rendering them unconscious. When Justine wakes up she finds herself inside a canoe which is being rowed by a couple of the cannibals. Trying to escape, she ends up in the water, fighting for her life. After the release, information surfaced that highlight how dangerous this scene truly was. It turns out that the actress playing Justine, Lorenza Izzo, was truly fighting for her own life while filming it.
Izzo could have been killed while shooting this scene; she nearly drowned. She was screaming at the top of her lungs, clinging to a rock in the river. The powerful current nearly dragged her under the water. At first, the crew didn't realize her screams were real, given the terror her character would have been experiencing at that moment. Fortunately, Izzo was rescued as soon as the stunt supervisor understood she wasn't acting. He could tell because her yells were a mix of English and Spanish. "We had a safe word for her to yell, but it was so loud that when she was screaming it at the top of her lungs, none of us heard her," Roth told Yahoo! Entertainment in a 2015 interview.
Ultimately, Roth ended up keeping some of this footage in the movie — so, many of the screams the viewers hear Justine emit are real. Izzo's close call wasn't the only scary incident on the set of The Green Inferno; the project was plagued by numerous other problems as well. There was no cell phone service, there was rarely a bathroom nearby, and the actors had to deal with filming in the presence of fire ants and tarantulas. Plus, Roth faced controversy upon the release of the movie, similar to what he dealt with upon the release of Hostel. People criticized The Green Inferno for how it portrayed indigenous peoples as savage.
Despite Izzo nearly dying in the river scene, and despite the other hurdles that appeared on set, The Green Inferno has established itself with a cult fan base over the years, and is certainly a classic installment in Roth's filmography.
