Having a parent who works behind the scenes in special effects, I’ve always been drawn to the props, squibs, and magic behind it all. Luckily my mom deals with explosions and gunshots on the Marvel Netflix series and not with cult horror classics. If you’ve never seen the original Poltergeist movies or 1986s The poltergeist: The Other Side, you’ve probably still heard of these unbelievable strings of real-life hardships that harassed the making of the film. Horror movies like The poltergeist, Twilight Zone: The Movie, The Exorcist, and The Crow all share similar themes as they are now known as “cursed”.  These “cursed” productions, or so the story goes, show as examples of how when you taunt the devil or the supernatural onscreen it only invites unholy results offscreen. Each became associated with the unexpected and often gruesome deaths of actors and crew members, freakish coincidences, and legendarily bad luck. I recently got to see the five-part docuseries on Shudder, “Cursed Films”, which brings in who’s left of each movie to talk about the events they encountered and the impact of each “curse”.

            While people attempted to remake The Poltergeist in 2015, nothing could compare to the real human skeletons of 1982s Original. The movie revolves around a suburban family who moves into a new home and begins to notice strange things surrounding their young daughter. One thing leads to another, a dimension gets opened and a house gets swallowed. While we don’t know of any horrific accidents happening on the set of the film, if googled, you will find the plethora of rumors of a curse on the original film trilogy’s cast. The “Poltergeist curse” is a rumored curse attached to the Poltergeist trilogy and its crew. It all started from the deaths of two young cast members in the six years between the release of the first and third films. Carol Anne Freeling, the young girl that was the star of the series, was played by Heather O’Rourke.

She was only six years old when the first Poltergeist film was released captivated audiences, but sadly, in 1987, a year after the release of the second film, she was “misdiagnosed with Crohn’s Disease. The next year, she fell ill again, and her symptoms were attributed to the flu. A day later, she collapsed and suffered a cardiac arrest. After being airlifted to a children’s hospital in San Diego, O’Rourke died during an operation, and it was later believed that she had been suffering from a congenital intestinal abnormality.” Dominique Dunne, who played the older sister Dana Freeling, met an almost more tragic and unexpected death. In 1982 she had a messy separation from her partner, John Sweeney. A couple of months after the break-up he showed up at Dunne’s house, pleading for her to take him back. When she refused, Sweeney “grabbed Dunne’s neck, choked her until she was unconscious, and then left her to die in her own driveway.” Sweeney was sentenced to six and a half years in prison but was unfortunately released after three years and seven months.The other two cast member deaths, however, were not as unpredictable or mysterious. Kane, the evil preacher from Poltergeist II who was played by Julian Beck, and Will Sampson, who played Taylor the Native American shaman. In 1983, Beck had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, which took his life soon after he finished work on the second movie of the series. Sampson died after undergoing a heart-lung transplant, which had a very slim survival rate. These mysterious events have made people believe that Poltergeist may be the most “cursed” franchise in Hollywood.

The Twilight Zone series, starting in 1959 and being revived as recently as 2019, has consistently thrilled us ad made us ponder our morals. So it was only right that before the first revival of the series it got a movie. Twilight Zone: The Movie is a 1983 feature film produced by Steven Spielberg. The film remade three classic episodes of the original series and included one original story. John Landis directed the prologue and the first segment, Steven Spielberg directed the second, Joe Dante the third, and George Miller directed the last part. Landis’s segment of the movie became notorious for a helicopter accident during the filming that caused the deaths of Vic Morrow and two child actors, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen The crash killed three people on the ground as well as injured the six helicopter passengers, including the director, John Landis.

Le and Chen were being paid under the table to avoid California’s child labor laws, which did not permit children to work at night. Landis chose to not seek a special waiver either, he didn’t think that he would get permission for such a late hour or maybe because he knew that he would not get approval to have young children in a scene with a large number of explosives. The incident led to years of civil and criminal action and it was directly responsible for the introduction of new procedures and safety standards within the filmmaking industry. The associate producer told the children’s parents not to tell any firefighters on the set that the children were part of the scene, and hid them from a fire safety officer. Unlike the other accidents in this essay, there is disturbing footage of the crash that shows the helicopter crashing down and the actor’s last moments.

If you like demonic possession or you’ve seen any spoof horror films you may be familiar with one of the most iconic and frightening movies in film history, The Exorcist. The film features demonic possession, exorcism, fly swarms, vomit, and the ever-iconic urinating on the floor during a dinner party. After watching you may be left disturbed, scared, or horrified, as well as having an inclination of doing a backbend. It is by far one of the most terrifying film series I history. The original Exorcist was so terrifying that the America evangelist Christian Billy Graham claimed that “the reels of the film themselves were possessed by demons!” But the good news is, that movie is just a fake.

The not so good news is the incidents surrounding the movie. The problems began early in filming. The reproduction of a Georgetown house where they were shooting caught fire when a pigeon flew into a circuit box, but oddly enough, Regan’s room was not harmed in the fire. During one of the scenes in the film, Regan, played by Linda Blair, is supposed to “throw” her mother, played by Ellen Burstyn, to the floor, injuring her. But the scene was all too real as something with rigging went wrong. The actual shot used was her real scream and she ended up suffering permanent damage to her back from the incident. On set other people suffered injuries as well, one carpenter accidentally cut off his thumb, and a lighting technician lost his toe. The film’s opening sequences were filmed on location in Iraq, where some delay caused the production to work there in July, which is the hottest part of the summer. Nine crew members were unable to work at one point or another, due to heatstroke and dysentery. During the projectile vomiting scene, the tubing misfired, and the vomit, instead of hitting Father Karras, played by Jason Miller, in the chest, it hit him in the face. His reaction is quite real and the scene only required one take.

If you looked up “cult-classic” in the dictionary, among many others, you may find a picture from the film “The Crow.” The Crow tells the story of a rock musician who is resurrected from the dead so that he can seek revenge for the murder of his fiancé and his own death. The Crow is so weighed down with spooky and tragic coincidence that it’s almost hard to look at it as a real movie, and much easier to see it as some supernatural symbol. Here we have a movie whose star was killed in a freak on-set accident while filming his own character’s death! Besides the film itself, the legacy of this movie is heavily influenced with the death of star Brandon Lee who along with many other accidents than the other films previously mentioned Lee’s performance is incredible along with The Crows and its characters, which are very intriguing and is another reason why this movie is such a cult classic.

Eric Draven or The Crow was played by the late Brandon Lee whose father was, of course, Bruce Lee, a screen icon who also died young. Bruce was in the middle of filming Game Of Death when he died, and there’s a scene in that movie where his character, a martial-arts movie star, is shot, with a gun that’s supposed to be fake. But when it comes to Brandon’s case he died while filming was underway in a freak accident when he was accidentally shot on set due to a faulty blank bullet. Lee’s death, unfortunately, wasn’t the only accident to have occurred during filming.

On the very first day of filming, 27-year-old carpenter Jim Martishius suffered serious burns over most of his body when live power lines collided with the crane he was in. That same day, a publicist working on the film was in a car accident, and an equipment truck mysteriously caught on fire. One crew member fell through a roof and broke several ribs, while one drove a screwdriver through his hand. A storm destroyed several sets, costing thousands of dollars in damages and another confusing story of a truck driving through the set, with stories differing about what exactly happened. Many claim that it was an accident, while some have suggested that the driver was a disgruntled employee gone temporarily berserk who was then immediately fired and then banned from the set. As with so much of this story, and so many different sides to it, it’s impossible to say for sure what happened, but it’s said to have ended in the man colliding with his steering wheel and suffering minor injuries.

I’ve always been a giant fan of the horror genre ad getting to learn all about this only enforced my love. Getting able to give these movies another screening after the Shudder series and some personal research, it just added a newfound level of scary behind them as well as appreciation. Accidents small and large happen on movie sets all the time but when it comes to the filming of horror movies it seems there’s a little more at risk than just explosions.