Leonardo DiCaprio sleeps in a 'horse carcass' in The Revenant. Someone has actually done that.

The Revenant.
(Image credit: Facebook/The Revenant Movie)

The Revenant has become one of the most talked about films of the Oscar race, in part because of the extremes actor Leonardo DiCaprio goes to while playing a fur trapper who survives a bear attack and is left for dead by his comrades. At one point, DiCaprio's character even crawls inside a horse carcass to keep warm (don't worry, that was a bit of movie magic — the horse was made of latex and no animals were thrown off a cliff in the making of the film).

But fake or not, one person who actually took shelter in a horse carcass to keep warm says the scene in The Revenant definitely "got the feeling of it right," The Washington Post reports.

Richard Dailey, 68, was 35 in late November 1983. He was deer hunting on Cuddy Mountain, on the Idaho border with Oregon, with his gray Appaloosa and his neighbor, Steven McCoy. Then the snowstorm hit and with it, hypothermia. The wind was blowing too hard to start a fire. Realizing that without a heat source they were surely going to die, McCoy recalled the Tauntaun scene in The Empire Strikes Back. "So I decided we needed to do the horses. I had him pull the trigger because I couldn't," Dailey said.

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Dailey said sheltering inside the dead horse was "initially" wonderful. "It was so warm. It just immediately reversed our hypothermia," Dailey said, adding that the experience quickly became "claustrophobic and grotesque." By morning the carcasses were no longer warm and then men resumed their hike out.

Dailey and his wife both liked The Revenant, their only question being that they couldn't understand "why [DiCaprio] got naked" before crawling into the horse. Read Dailey's entire story in The Washington Post.

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Jeva Lange

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.