Cursed Films

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Didn’t everyone on the film Poltergeist die? What about The Exorcist? Surely some spooky goings on happened on The Omen set…

Tales of death, doom and disaster always circulate around horror films. Whether this enhances their appeal to us or serves to heighten the hype, these coincidences continue to fascinate even if the links between these unfortunate occurrences seem more tenuous than ‘The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ game.

John Richardson had been the special effects consultant on The Omen. On Friday 13th he was in a car accident in Holland that killed his passenger. The manner of death, decapitation, was eerily similar to the one he had masterminded on The Omen. And the road sign pointing the way to the nearest Dutch town read: Ommen, 66.6 km.

However this was just the latest in a long line of eerie coincidences on The Omen. Actor Gregory Peck’s son sadly killed himself two months before filming in London commenced and both Peck’s flight and executive producers Mace Neufeld’s plane was hit by lightening as they crossed the Atlantic. The hotel in which Neufeld and his wife stayed in during filming was bombed by the IRA; so too was a restaurant where all the cast and crew had planned to have dinner. A plane they had been due to hire for aerial filming was switched to another client at the last minute and crashed on take-off, killing all on board. A tiger handler died in a freak accident. Stuntman Alf Joint was later badly injured when an ‘easy’ stunt jumping off a roof for his next film went wrong. He later told friends that ‘he felt like he had been pushed’.

Poltergeist fared no better. Each of the three Poltergeist films were marked by a death. A year after the release of the first film, lead actress Dominique Dunn was murdered. Actor Julian Beck died in 1985, as production on Poltergeist II began; and 12-year-old actress Heather O’Rourke died from septic shock less than a year after the release of Poltergeist III.

Linda Blair, the child actor from The Exorcist, has claimed her experience on the film made her resolve never to have children. One of America’s most infamous serial killers, Jeffrey Dahmer, watched Exorcist III over and over before killing his victims. The film was playing on the video when the police arrested him.

The 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby focuses on a young Manhattan woman whose husband trades their unborn child with a group of devil worshippers. Producer William Castle had kidney failure  a few months later and convalesced in the same hospital as Krzysztof Komeda, the Polish composer who wrote the score for the film and an old friend of director Roman Polanski. Komeda however died of a brain clot, a death which echoes that of Rosemary’s friend Hutch in the film. Then a year after its release, Roman Polanski’s wife, actress Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Californian religious sect the Manson family. She was pregnant at the time.

Although not a horror, an equalling chilling tale stalks Bruce and Brandon Lee. Bruce Lee, one of the most famous martial artists of all time, died in 1973 with a verdict of ‘death by misadventure’ (officially attributed to Cerebral Edema). However, lots of theories sprung up including rumours of Triads seeking protection money and rival martial artists out for revenge. A film made by Bruce Lee the year he died has a scene where he is shot with a gun he thinks is unloaded. How coincidental is it that Bruce’s son, Brandon Lee, was shot and killed on the set of The Crow in 1993, when a gun supposed to be loaded with blanks actually contained live bullets. To this day, nobody knows how a real bullet found its way onto the set.

What about Rebel Without A Cause? James Dean filmed an advert for the National Highways Committee in which he asked America’s young drivers to drive safely, “because the next life you save may be mine”? A few weeks later James Dean died in a car crash, the same weekend as the film opened. Co-star Natalie Wood drowned in unusual circumstances in November 1981, and another RWAC star, Sal Mineo, died five years earlier in a knife fight. Troy McHenry, a Beverly Hills doctor, bought the engine from Dean’s Porsche and had it installed in his own car, but was killed the first time he drove it.

The Superman franchise has suffered with the whisper of a curse. Actor George Reeves played the superhero on television in the Fifties but died in the same decade of a single gunshot wound in mysterious circumstances. Christopher Reeve next played the superhero but was later paralysed after a riding accident and died in 2004. His co-star, Margot Kidder, suffered psychosis later in life. And who was the director of the first film? Richard Donner, fresh from filming The Omen.

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MyVillage, 12th October