Imaginary Worlds - The Curse of The Curse

Episode Date: May 14, 2020

When things go wrong, it’s tempting to say something’s cursed as a joke. But when things go dreadfully wrong on horror movie sets, some fans have speculated that the films were literally cursed. Jay Cheel talks about his new documentary series “Cursed Films,” which explores why people believe the cast and crew of The Exorcist, The Omen, and other horror films were targeted by demonic forces. Special effects artist Craig Reardon and director Gary Sherman separate fact from fiction with the alleged Poltergeist curse. And I talk with professor Brandon Grafius, author of “Reading the Bible with Horror,” about why religion can prompt us to believe in curses.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body Deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. Before beginning this episode, I want to tell you about the class that I teach at NYU on making a

podcast. Originally, the class was in person, but NYU has gone completely virtual for now. So you can take my summer class wherever you live. It runs for eight consecutive Mondays, starting June 22nd from 6.30 to 9 p.m. Eastern Time. If that fits with your schedule, the class is called Creating a Narrative Podcast, and you can sign up on the NYU website. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. It was 1988. I was riding the school bus home. In fact, I remember the exact street that we were on when we heard over the radio that Heather O'Rourke, the little girl from the Poltergeist movies, had died of a rare intestinal disease.

We were shocked. And then one of the other kids on the bus said that three other actors from the Poltergeist movies had died, including the teenage star of the first movie, Dominique Dunn, who was killed by her boyfriend. To me, this just sounded like a series of disturbing coincidences. But the kids on the bus believed the franchise was cursed. Eventually, I learned there is a list of horror films that are supposedly cursed. And when I say cursed, I mean people believe that demonic or otherworldly forces put a curse on the cast and crew. Now, even when I heard that as a kid, I did not believe this curse was real. A lot of films have terrible luck. Horrible things can happen on the set regardless of what kind of movie it is.

And these tragedies don't happen more often on horror movies. But when they do, I'm fascinated that people have built this narrative that fits perfectly with the genre, as if they want what they're seeing on screen to be real. Jay Cheal is a documentary filmmaker who just made a limited series called Cursed Films for the streaming site Shudder. He also first learned about these horror movie curses as a kid. Yeah, I grew up with these stories. I never really believed that there was anything supernatural behind any of it, but it definitely piqued my curiosity along with everyone else

who talks about and perpetuates these legends. Full disclosure, the website Shudder has advertised on this podcast before, but that did not affect our decision to cover Jay's documentary series on Shudder. In fact, we wanted to do an episode about this subject for a long time, but we had trouble finding people to talk with. A lot of serious horror fans and people who worked on those productions are so disgusted that these urban legends exist, they don't want to engage with them on any level. But they're still out there. I mean, the first time I Googled cursed horror films, I got like 15 pages full of articles and blog posts

and YouTube videos, all taking these curses seriously or even semi-seriously. Now, if you look at the list of cursed movies, most of them go back to Rosemary's Baby in 1968, which did not have a lot of trouble during production. It was more about the eerie coincidences of people who died afterwards. But the first horror movie to be publicly labeled as cursed when it came out was The

Exorcist in 1973. There were a lot of scary mishaps and injuries on set. Actors or people connected to the movie died during production. And the studio encouraged those stories to spread because as the old saying goes, no publicity is bad publicity. It was the one that extended beyond the film and into the PR campaign.

And the idea of Billy Graham apparently having said that the film itself is cursed and when you project it in a theater the it could have negative effects on the audience and and that was leaned into and reports of people passing out and apparently in Toronto supposedly someone passed out and hit their jaw on the floor and had to be taken to the hospital. And it's certainly, if it's not the first one, it's certainly the first one that had the kind of coverage that you would expect from a film that would go on to be considered a legendarily cursed production. In 1976, The Omen had many of the same kinds of mishaps. When the actor Gregory Peck was on his way to make The Omen, his plane was struck by lightning.

A stuntman who worked on the production was mauled by a tiger. But that movie came out three years after The Exorcist. By that point, working on a demonic horror film already fit into a pre-existing narrative. Here is a clip from Jay's documentary where the director of The Omen, Richard Donner, is describing a conversation he had with a religious advisor on the film. His name was Robert Munger. In the very beginning, when we were first setting up the process of shooting a film in England, Munger told us we were treading on very thin ice, that the Antichrist would do everything not to have this picture made.

For me, that was in one ear and out the other. You know, in our Omen episode, Richard Donner and Mace Neufeld, the director and executive producer of The Omen, both say that they feel that The Omen was actually blessed because it did so well. You know, the box office numbers were amazing and they all survived. You know, the further you dig into that, all of the stories surrounding the making of The Omen are all, it's just a list of close calls. It's a lot of, we were at a cafe that was bombed an hour after we left, or we were supposed to be on a plane that then crashed, which raises the question of either the devil is really not good at killing people, or the devil was protecting the crew because the devil wanted this story told. was protecting the crew because the devil wanted this story told.

Since the idea of cursed films touches on religion, I wanted to talk with a religious scholar who was also an expert in horror films. Brandon Grafius is a professor at the Ecumenical Theological Seminary, and he wrote the book Reading the Bible with Horror. He first made the connection between the Bible and horror when he was working on his dissertation. And for my dissertation, I was reading the book of Numbers. There's a story in Numbers that Israelites are wandering through the desert. They start messing around with foreign gods. God gets angry at them. And when an Israelite man brings a Midianite woman into the camp, they go into the tent and are

doing something together. One of the priests named Phineas picks up a spear and skewers them both. And as I read this, it connected with me, hey, I've seen that in Friday the 13th part two. So started to think about this story as being really similar to the 1980s slasher films that are about these anxieties over our community boundaries, anxieties over control of sexuality and how the patriarchy tries to reassert itself. Brandon is not surprised that horror films can be labeled as cursed because the filmmakers are trying to show images that are considered forbidden knowledge in our culture. I think a lot of horror is really about forbidden knowledge, knowledge of the afterlife, knowledge of evil, and even knowledge of the insides of bodies, that the insides of our bodies are supposed to be hidden from us. And often horror exposes that.

So there's this sense that when we watch horror, we sometimes have this sense that this maybe isn't something we're supposed to be watching. But we do enjoy it. And there's been all kinds of academic studies about why that is, from experiencing it in a safe distance or overcoming your fears of death or anything like that. But we have some piece of our mind that tells us if we were really normal, we wouldn't like this stuff. That's so interesting. So in a weird way, you feel like you're desecrating your mind to some extent by watching horror. Absolutely. Absolutely. So the idea of a cursed movie has kind of taken that one step farther. One of the major functions of religion is about how we navigate the space between humanity and the divine. Frequently, the realm of the divine and the monstrous are blended together. They're all outside of the human realm. So there's not such a distinction between the divine and the monstrous when you get outside of the human.

It's all just space that we're not supposed to go. all just space that we're not supposed to go. You see it in the Old Testament in the priestly texts, like in Leviticus and Numbers, that all of these rituals are set up for how you navigate those spaces, how you exist in those spaces, even temporarily, safely. We see a couple of stories where it goes wrong, like when the priest Uzzah accidentally touches the ark as it's, you know, it's on a parade going to Jerusalem and it starts to wobble. So he tries to steady it and he's killed instantly. Even though he was doing it with good intention, he was not following the rules. It's funny too, because, you know, so much of Orthodox Judaism is about the rules. It is, I mean, so many rules that you have to follow,

or you will bring on potentially the anger of God. Maybe that's another reason why these ideas of transgressions in horror films or in religious practices really interest you. I think that's a really, really good point, that both horror and religion are concerned with transgressions and how we stay away from them, how we repair things once they've been committed, because both horror and religion acknowledge that transgressions are also a part of life. Right. And when somebody in the Scream movie says, these are the rules and you'll break them at your peril, or if somebody says that in the Bible, it's like, you know, somebody is going to break those rules. Of course. Yeah, I think that was Freud who came up with the notion that the only reason we have rules is because we want to break them. You don't have rules for things that you don't want to do. Do you think there's something particularly interesting about

the movies that often get chosen, like The Old Man and Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist for Tempting Fate? They tend to be movies that are showing us ideas about how the struggle between good and evil on a cosmic level might play out in a way that we as a culture maybe haven't seen before dramatized in this kind of a way. So the cursed movies, the movies that get labeled as cursed, like Rosemary's Baby, like The Exorcist, these are all really groundbreaking movies. You know, that actually makes sense because when you think about it, a lot of the restrictions and codes going back to the 1930s were being lifted around this time. And so people were seeing things on screen that they had literally never seen before. But there's this feeling of like, yeah, we're all grownups. We can handle watching this, right?

Yeah. No, I think that's really, really true that we were seeing things on screen that we had not seen on screen before. Rosemary's Baby was pretty shocking when it came out. The Exorcist was terrifying. But what about the people who worked on those movies that were labeled as cursed? Are they able to shrug off all that bad publicity? Or did all that media hype affect them personally? After the break, we will go behind the scenes of one of the most allegedly cursed franchises. I have to admit, until I saw Jay Cheal's documentary series, I hadn't thought much about how the cast or crew were affected by these urban legends.

I sort of imagined that the people who made these lists of cursed films and the people who were making those films did not come into contact with each other. Turns out I was wrong. To begin with, a lot of people who worked on those movies were traumatized by what happened. Like in Jay's episode about the crow, we hear from the actor Michael Berryman, who worked with Brandon Lee before Brandon Lee was killed by a faulty prop gun on the set of The Crow. And then people are going, the curse of The Crow. There was some electrician, somebody got electrocuted. This happened, that happened, this happened, that happened.

Don't you think? Is it possible? Is it? Really? Really? No. The Crow was not cursed. The Crow was created out of love and loss. In my opinion, Brandon died because a studio cut corners. But the episode that really got to me the most in Jay's TV show was the one about Poltergeist. And until I watched the episode, I did not know that there was a very specific, unusual reason why the franchise is

supposedly cursed. It goes back to a scene in the first Poltergeist movie, where Jo Beth Williams' character ends up in a flooded swimming pool full of skeletons. The Poltergeist curse is often attributed to these rumors that they used real skeletons from India, and this is blasphemous, and they've desecrated these bodies, and it led to a curse. Whether that's true or not, I don't know,

but I tend to believe that is true because those skeletons do look pretty good. Now, if the use of real skeletons supposedly triggered a curse, Jay wanted to talk with a special effects designer on Poltergeist, a guy named Craig Reardon. And I reached out to him via email, and he sent a very long response that basically, he basically threatened to sue me personally if we even mentioned his name in the show, because he had a bad experience when he was interviewed for E! True Hollywood Stories' The Curse of Poltergeist episode, which leans very heavily into the supernatural side of things and presented his interview in a light that wasn't very fair, I guess. Jay got me in touch with Craig Reardon, who confirmed that when Jay first asked him to

be in the documentary, I vowed that I would come at them with all my guns, you know, and even if it was bluff. So poor Jay, who I've since come to know and admire and respect, sends me a, you know, a courteous email. And I basically tell them, you know, first of respect, sends me a courteous email, and I basically tell them, first of all, go after yourself. Second of all, if you even try to associate me with anything you're going to do,

I'll sue you, which of course, you know, empty threat. Before working on Poltergeist, Craig was a go-to guy for horror and supernatural effects, back when those effects were mostly what we would call practical effects, meaning not CG. He was thrilled to get the call to work on Poltergeist because it was produced by Steven Spielberg. I mean, just the fact that he could add a Steven Spielberg movie to his resume propelled him to the next level in his career.

But many years later... In just regular Google searches of my name, which I would only do periodically to see, you know, some friend had posted an old photo of me or something like that. You know, simple, stupid ego explorations. And I keep hitting this goddamn story of how I killed half the cast of Folded Guys. What really upset him was to see these deaths listed as bullet points. He worked with Dominique Dunn, the teenage star of Poltergeist, who was killed by her boyfriend a year after the movie came out.

I can't believe that anyone that worked on Poltergeist wasn't heartbroken and appalled to hear the news about Dominique Dunn. My first thought in hearing it in the evening news was that the following day I would try to find out what hospital she was in and send her some flowers because all they said was she was in critical condition. It was just the next day she died, and I couldn't believe it. What really blew his mind was that he was supposedly to blame for these deaths because he used real skeletons, like it was a big taboo. But filmmakers had been using real skeletons on movies going all the way back to Frankenstein.

You know, it almost made me think I'm going to keep a notepad by me when I look at some of my movie collection because there are hundreds of old movies with bones in them. He thinks the urban legend probably dated back to an interview that he gave, where he explained how he had never used skeletons before, didn't know where to get them. So he asked his friend, the legendary special effects artist Rick Baker. And he was helpful. He told me, well, these are obtainable through a biological supply. So I obtained their catalog. They had an option between actual skeletons or plastic skeletons. I chose the human skeletons. They had a character each of their own. Not only that, they were imperfect. The plastic skeletons were uniform.

They would all look absolutely identical. Same height, same skull, same, same, same. Plastic skeletons are also more expensive because somebody had to put the work in to make them. I mean, typically a low-budget horror film would not be able to afford plastic skeletons. Although Steven Spielberg used real skeletons in Raiders of the Lost Ark because they had a lot of character to them. In fact, Spielberg specifically asked Craig to do a better job animating the skeletons on Poltergeist than what they had done on Raiders of the Lost Ark. He says, I want them to be on the edge of,

so that people will see something that they can't process. Are they alive or are they, or aren't they? And I thought that's a cool notion, you know, because Spielberg's a sharp cookie. But what we did, I'm saying we, I had a very talented guy that was working with me, Mike McCracken. I did the bulk of the sculptures right over the skulls, right over the skulls with clay. All of those skeletons were rigged so that they moved, nodded, opened their mouth, could lift their arms, could open their hands, even though nobody saw them move. Because once we got them into the pool, which we had never had an opportunity to do, the mechanism simply didn't function properly. And besides that, there was no way to route the means of how they were moved out of the pool. As you can tell, Craig is still annoyed that he has to defend himself about this.

But so long as the urban legend is out there, he feels compelled to do it. I often wonder, in fact, if these people really feel badly about these people's deaths or if they're just, you know, they're just playing a statistic game. But the death that really amplified the legend of the poltergeist curse was Heather O'Rourke. She died during the making of Poltergeist 3. She had a rare disease called congenital stenosis, but her doctors thought she had Crohn's disease. The doctors didn't realize their mistake until it was too late. I heard them talking. He said it was my daddy's fault because of the houses. The houses my daddy built on their graves.

He said I had to lead them into the light. Into the light! Why do you have to lead them, Carol Ann? Gary Sherman was the director on Poltergeist 3, and he was willing to talk to me and appear in J.H.L.'s documentary because he wants to pay tribute to Heather, so she's remembered for more than just the way she died. Gary did not have a great experience filming Poltergeist 3 because the studio didn't give him any creative

freedom with the story. I hate the movie as a movie. I love the effects. I love what we were able to accomplish with the effects. As a movie, I think it's an awful movie. The one really bright spot of that whole production was getting to work with Heather O'Rourke. Heather was fantastic. By about the second week or something of shooting, Heather came up to me and said, you know, I really like the way you work. She said, this is really fun. She said, there were other directors that I've worked with that I haven't liked working with She said, you know, Stephen was wonderful. But Poltergeist 2, I didn't enjoy myself that much. But she said, I'm really enjoying this, and I like the way you work.

And she says, you know, I'm not planning on being an actor my whole career. I want to be a director. And I think I could learn a lot from you. So do you mind if when I'm not on camera, if I kind of sit on the set and watch you work? You know, if it's okay with the welfare worker it's okay with me i love having you around and i mean i directed a lot of scenes in that movie with heather sitting next to me on the set the best moment was you know when we were shooting the garage scene and the explosion in the garage we had a problem problem. And I mean, the explosion got

out of hand and it was all over the news and everybody was going on about it. And so the next morning I'm sitting in my office and Heather comes running in and says to me, Gary, Gary, I saw in the news about the explosion and the fire. I said, yeah, it was really dramatic. And she said, was everybody okay? And I said, yeah, everybody was fine. And she said, oh, that's good. Then she looks at me and says, did you get the shot? That's so great.

I mean, when you talk about what happened on the set of the Poltergeist 3, it's so, like, you talk about it like it just happened, you know, and it was a long, long time ago. I mean, does it still feel like something you think about periodically and think about Heather? Yeah, I do think about it. She was an incredibly interesting human being at 11 years old. She was like 11 going on 45. She was just fantastic. And she wasn't well, which was, you know, another problem. And we had doctors around for her all the time. Unfortunately, they had misdiagnosed what was wrong with her.

He'll never forget the phone call when he learned that Heather had died. They still had more work to do in the film. He wanted to walk away, but the studio made him finish it. He had to film the ending with another little girl in Heather's role, but they obscured her face. You know, nobody wanted to do publicity. All of us refused to go on the publicity tour. None of us. We all said, we're not going out to promote the film.

None of us felt the film should have been released. He was hoping to move on, but the cast and crew were hounded by the media, wanting to know if they believed the film was cursed, as if they had put Heather in danger for allowing her to work on it. You know, and I just got attacked from, I mean, I couldn't pick up my phone. I couldn't open my front door without there being reporters and things wanting to talk to me about Heather's death and about the curse. And I refused to talk to anybody.

So I actually moved temporarily and changed my phone number. I just couldn't, I couldn't deal with it. I just didn't want to talk about the curse. You know, I get contacted by people on Facebook and Instagram and everything all the time. Comes up even in social situations, people ask about the curse and I just say, not a subject I am willing to discuss because not something I believe in. I think the real curse is the legend of the curse because it has become a curse for people involved in those productions and even people not involved in the productions. Like in Jay Chiel's episode on Poltergeist, he shows a montage of fans going to the house where Poltergeist was filmed. The reason why I'm whispering is because I'm at the Poltergeist house and the garage door is open.

And there was a scene that we ended up having to cut where we actually were filming in front of the Poltergeist house and the owner of the house happened to pull up as we were filming, they were not happy. They were not interested in talking on camera there. So we couldn't use the footage. So, yeah, I mean, I think that definitely could feel like a curse to someone who lives in that home. In another episode, he talks with Linda Blair, who actually had a good experience making The Exorcist. The real hell was the publicity around the movie

and all these questions around the curse. And some people couldn't separate her from her character. Were you assigned bodyguards? I won't talk about it. No? No, there's stuff that I don't talk about. So, what's another one? That's the legacy of The Exorcist, you know,

and it's the legacy with Linda Blair and people actually thinking that this little 12-year-old girl could actually, at the very best, have been psychologically damaged by her experience working on the film, and the very worst could actually be the devil. There are many ways in which these films are cursed, and the people that worked on them are cursed in kind of more not so much of a literal sense. On the bright side, Jay says that not as many horror films are being labeled as cursed

anymore, even if they have troubled productions. The fact that curses are not really, you don't hear about them too much nowadays because everything is so well documented and might sort of, for a lack of a better phrase, like kill the buzz that people might have in perpetuating these stories at parties when they see how real some of these events were and the effects that they had on the people that were involved with them. So I don't think the PR surrounding major blockbuster films really wants to embrace a stunt person losing an arm on the set of a Resident Evil film or a camera assistant being hit by a train. Those accidents now, to frame those as having been curses, I think we're in a different time where that would just be looked at as very tasteless. I understand why the idea of a curse would be appealing.

It creates a narrative framework out of chaos. Even if it's scary to imagine some kind of demonic entity in charge, at least somebody's in charge. Imagining terrible things happening at random can be much scarier. And we don't need dark supernatural forces to curse someone. A curse can be psychological. That doesn't make it any less real. We can curse somebody with our words and with our actions. No spells required. and with our actions.

No spells required. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Brandon Grafius, Craig Reardon, Gary Sherman, and Jay Cheal. His series, Cursed Films,

is on the streaming site, Shudder. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emalinski and imagineworldspod. And if you like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or a shout out on social media. But the best way to support Imaginary Worlds is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you can get either free Imaginary Worlds stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can learn more at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.