“The horse didn’t really die, even though that’s what people have been saying over the years,” Petersen said before his own death in 2022. “First of all, we had two identical horses playing Artax. They were so beautiful. They had been trained for a long, long time by a professional horse handler that a horse has to slowly sink into the mud up to its head without resistance. It didn’t go over its head, no horse would ever do that.”
It apparently took months to train one or both of the “Artax” actors to rehearse the scene, and if you watch closely, the film actually never shows Artax’s head diving under the bog; we only see him resisting a boy trying to pull on his mouth with all his might. Hathaway also vividly recalled filming this tug-of-war to EW.
“I feel like I sent people to therapy because of that scene with Artax,” the actor said. “The horse they used was really wonderful and they spent a couple of months teaching her to be OK with being up to her neck in water. That’s something she’s not used to. So we did that scene so they had a little elevator under the water that slowly dropped the horse down. When it got to the chin area, we cut the scene. That one scene took over two and a half weeks… (but) they were more careful with that horse than they were with me! I got hurt a hell of a lot more. The horse was definitely well taken care of.”
Like so many urban legends and behind-the-scenes gossip that are passed down like scripture, the Artax story is entirely fabricated—almost quaint, considering the film cuts significantly before showing the horse underwater—but its persistence speaks to some of the things our collective culture today has both lost and gained.
In its own strange way, this rumor is a compliment to Petersen, Hathaway and everyone who worked on it The never-ending story. The scene in the film is so effectively sad and despairing that it left a lasting mark on the psyche of Gen X kids and “older” millennials everywhere. With the simplicity of a fairy tale, the sequence provides a safe space to introduce a child to the idea of depression, sadness, and even death. While many of the film’s target audience were hopefully too young to understand true mortality, the loss of Artax mirrors the death of a beloved pet they may have known, allowing them to grapple with those emotions in a setting that also has a happy ending (spoiler: Artax comes back at the end!).
The scene hooks the viewer into the stakes of Atreyu’s mission – his horse has died! – while also providing a cathartic release of emotions in a fantasy setting. Even by 80s children’s film standards, Artax’s death is pretty brutal, but not The much more than when Old Yeller was struck down a generation before, or when Mufasa in the above-mentioned The Lion King a decade later. But because it’s almost impossible to imagine a modern family film in which a scene like this speaks of something that has been lost.
