“Stand By Me” takes place in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Oregon (Reiner would later name his production company after the town), the bustling hub of several King tales with enough crossover to justify its own series. Brownsville, an Oregon town that captured the vintage feel needed to take its audience back to 1959, was the primary shooting location throughout the summer of 1985. It’s not the best time to swim around in stagnant water, but that’s what ended up happening to the lead quartet during shooting. Corey Feldman told Variety:
“For the leeches scene, they said, ‘We’ve got a clean lake in the middle of the forest. It’s been made by us and it’s all movie stuff, movie water and movie dirt. We dug a hole, encased it in plastic and filled it up with fresh water.’ The thing they failed to realize was they built this at the beginning of the shoot and by the time we actually got to that scene, it was six weeks later and they’d left it there uncovered. It was no longer man made, as far as all the worms and the bugs and the leaves and the raccoons, they were all in there. Nature took its course.”
Armed with this knowledge, watching the boys roughhouse in chest-deep water takes on extra-foul dimensions. And it didn’t end with Gordie passing out. In the same oral history, Wheaton describes going to a nearby mall with Phoenix, O’Connell, and Feldman after shooting the scene, and being turned away from the water slides “because they thought we had open lesions on our skin.”
At least the groin-feasting leech didn’t explode like it did in the book.
