The tragic events on the set of 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie changed safety precautions and protocols on film sets, and they even impacted Rob Reiner's classic boys' coming-of-age film from 1986, Stand By Me. Featuring big names like Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Kiefer Sutherland, it follows a group of tween boys as they traverse the Oregon countryside while searching for the dead body of another missing boy.
The powerful dramedy, which is based on the Stephen King novella The Body, fleshes out quite a bit within its 89 minutes. Not only is the confusing and formative span of time between early childhood and main teenage years touched upon in great detail, but the individual challenges of each boy's personal life are also portrayed. Stand By Me's depiction of childhood has plenty of great writing, acting, and directing to boot--which allows for some memorable and highly effective moments. Scenes like Gordie's touching encounter with a deer in the wilderness and the famous sequence where the pack of youths desperately outrun a train have become pieces of the film that people easily recall when thinking of it.
Stand By Me, like many other movies, was impacted by the changes to safety precautions that had been spurred by the tragic deaths on the set of The Twilight Zone movie. Three years before Stand By Me's release, the project based on Rod Serling's paranormal, sci-fi-infused TV series had three accidental deaths during filming. While shooting a scene involving a helicopter, actor Vic Morrow and child actors Renee Shin-Yi Chen and Myca Dinh Le were killed when it crashed. The loss of life on the movie of the canceled Twilight Zone show was terrible, made worse by the fact that child labor laws had been violated. Safety protocols and stunt procedures were revamped following the horrific accident. According to a 2012 article from Slate, a committee was formed at Warner Bros. that "created standards for every aspect of filmmaking, from gunfire to fixed-wing aircraft to smoke and pyrotechnics." On-set accidents still happened, but many projects were positively impacted from a safety standpoint, and Stand By Me was one of them.
In fact, the film's famous train scene even required stunt doubles in lieu of its child stars. Reiner said in a 2021 interview with The Guardian, "[t]he train sequence was difficult. For long shots we had stunt doubles and when I did shots with the actual boys, we used long lenses so the train looked like it was right on top of them even though it hadn’t even entered the trestle." Alongside the cast of Stand By Me, the train sequence is a major and iconic component, and the behind-the-scenes information really restructures the way one thinks about it.
The tragedy on the Twilight Zone movie's set should never have happened, and the losses of that day can never be amended. But, since the event did take place, it's good to know that--at the very least--some good came out of the reevaluations that occurred in its wake. And it's fascinating to watch classic films like Stand By Me knowing that the way they were made was partially influenced by new regulations prompted by the infamous and disastrous mishap.