'Realised horror films weren't for me after watching Halloween'

Los Angeles: Ewan McGregor was a teenager when he watched John Carpenter's horror classic Halloween and the actor says he was so traumatised that he avoided the genre for years.

The actor, who stars in Doctor Sleep, sequel to 1980 film The Shining, recalled an incident from his childhood that initially scared him away of horror movies.

"I watched Halloween when I was about 13 or 14. I went away with a pipe band I played into Holland. We were playing in the streets of Den Bosch in Holland. One night, the people who had had us over there, in a little screening room, showed Halloween to a bunch of kids. I don't know what they were doing! F***ing sadists!," he said.

"And when we left, the projectionist, he'd hung a towel up outside the door, a wet towel, so as we left, we walked into this wet towel. (It) freaked everyone out. And then I just realised that horror films weren't for me," McGregor told Entertainment Weekly.

The impact was so telling that he steered clear of watching The Shining, Stanley Kubrick's big-screen adaptation of the Stephen King novel, for a long time.

"It took me years to watch The Shining because I'd just heard it was so scary," he said.

The original movie starred Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, a writer who agrees to become the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel in Colorado during its off season. The events that follow tear the Torrance family apart. Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd also starred in the film.

Doctor Sleep follows an adult Danny Torrance (McGregor), who is battling alcoholism and dealing with the trauma of what happened to him as a child in the hotel.

The film will serve as the sequel to the screen adaptation of Stephen King's book and Kubrick's movie.

Directed by Mike Flanagan of The Haunting of the Hill House fame, it is slated to be released on November 8.