WHAT WENT WRONG - Poltergeist

Episode Date: October 13, 2020

We’re hee-eere… with an episode that explores how cutting costs on some ghastly props may have been the cause of an enduring curse that spanned Poltergeist, all of its sequels, and even its 2015 reboot. This week join Chris & Lizzie as they dig deep into the bizarre events and numerous deaths that followed the franchise.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast on What Went Wrong on some of Hollywood's biggest flops and most surprising successes. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer here with Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how you doing this week? I'm doing great because we finally got to watch a movie that I genuinely really like for this episode. Very true. I love this movie as well. It gave me nightmares as a child.

I watched it when I was way too young. my dad was like, oh, it's just, it's like a more of like a ghost comedy. Nope, it's terrifying. Lizzie, tell us what we're talking about this week. Well, first, Chris, I'd just like to play a little clip. You son of a bitch, you moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn't you? You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only move the headstones. You only move the headstones.

Why? Why? Craig T. Nelson on PCB. Ladies and gentlemen. No, that is Craig T. Nelson in the 1982 horror classic Poltergeist. That is what we are talking about today. And folks, just when you thought you've heard us talk about Steven Spielberg enough, we pull you back in like the demonic clown doll from the Hellmouth in your closet

because, yes, he is a featured player in today's episode as well. Chris, you just watched the movie. I know you've seen it before. What's your experience with Poltergeist? Excellent movie. Holds up, in my opinion. A lot of the effects hold up really well. Things I loved.

The movie just, you jump right in. I forgot that Carol Ann just starts talking to the TV, like right from the get-go. They're not wasting any time. Really fun. Just has that great kind of campy 1980s feel. I thought it held up really well. I thought a lot of the effects held up really well. It's still scary.

The clown doll still scares me. Terrified me as a child. The thing that really struck me upon rewatching it that I think is so smart and I didn't really think about when I had first seen this movie when I was younger, is that by setting it in a housing development, which is brand new, they completely subvert the trope of the ghost haunting an older house, that this is something that has lived here, that it is a tragedy doomed to repeat itself again and again, no, this is like anywhere in America, the homes are new, especially on the West Coast, you could still have a ghost. And it is so smart and it's so fun. And it makes it so, as an

audience, we're not worried about figuring out what the logic of the ghost is or what the story of the ghost is or what the ghost really even wants. It's just like, ghost is here. Shit's getting crazy. And I think that's one of the things that makes this such a thrill ride is it's not weighed down by the kind of gothic baggage of the older house story. So I think one of the things that Poltergeist does so well and what it taps into is sort of both the innocence and also the inherent creepiness of children. Oh, absolutely. 100%. Yeah. So excited to find out what have gone wrong because this movie, I felt, stood the test of time. It does. The movie's excellent. A lot does go wrong, however. And today we're going to talk

about how this movie was terrifying both on and off screen, the curse that followed many of the cast after the movie was released. That is the infamous poltergeist cursed. And the lingering mystery of who really directed this horror classic, which is something I didn't know a ton about. I'd always heard a little bit about. So we are going to get into that. I always assumed Steven Spielberg directed it, but then... That's the... We're going to get into it. Yeah.

That is a rumor. But he's not the credited director. He is not. The credited director is Toby Hoover. That's correct. So the movie follows the Freeling family in suburban California when they discover that their house is inhabited by a pack of unfriendly ghosts who suck their daughter into another dimension and they spend the movie basically trying to get her back.

Various other characters show up, including... three paranormal researchers and then everyone's favorite, the creepy little media. Zelda Rubenstein. This house is clean. It's the greatest, one of the best moments in movie history. She is wonderful. So it is directed by Toby Hooper, as Chris said, or at least that is who is credited with directing it, produced by Stephen Spielberg, who also co-wrote it, which I did not know, alongside Michael Grace. I might be mispronouncing that.

and Mark Victor. It stars Craig T. Nelson as Mr. Freeling, Jo Beth Williams, as Mrs. Freeling, Dominique Dunn as their teenage daughter. Oliver Robbins as Robbie Freeling, Heather O'Rourke, as the aforementioned Carol Ann, who she was only six years old, by the way. She's so cute.

She's like a... Oh, she's excellent. She's a little doll. She's like a doll. She's the tiniest little thing. And then, of course, Zelda Rubinstein as, I believe it's tan... I think it's...

Tangina. But it looks like tangina barons, the spiritual medium who they bring into the house and politely ask the ghost to stop fucking around with their family. Now, poltergeist, I learned, is a German word that basically translates to noisy ghost. I actually knew that because my dad is obsessed with weird German words. And I thought it was poultrygeist when I was little. And then he was like, no, it's poltergeist.

and also you're an idiot. Side note, poultry geist would be terrifying because that would be a ghost that's like obsessed with chickens and that's not good or a chicken ghost. Or chicken ghost is what I was going to go for.

Also not good. So poltergeists are known for throwing objects, pinching, biting, hitting, and tripping people. They're just rude. According to Wikipedia, the most trusted source I can think of for ghost news and information,

they tend to haunt people and not so much places, which is interesting, given some of what we're going to talk about today as it pertains to the poltergeist curse. As I said, the movie comes out in 1982 on June 4th, which was an enormous year for Spielberg because, Chris, what other movie do you think was released on June 11th only a week after Poltergeist? I'm going to guess E.T. It's E.T.

Oh, excellent movie. I'm very proud of that guess. Yeah. So of the two films, Spielberg said Poltergeist is a screen. E.T. is a whisper. I would say that's accurate, given Poultergeist is an absolute nightmare. He T's like a hearty laugh followed by a hug. That's fair. There is a very good reason that they were released so close together. So let's dive in. The story of Poultergeist begins with Columbia Pictures when they approach Steven Spielberg about a sequel to close encounters of the

third kind at some point in the late 70s. Of course, this is a movie we've discussed a couple times. It's something he was working on almost simultaneous to Star Wars. It starred Richard Dreyfus. Great. It's an alien movie. Spielberg writes up a treatment for this sequel, which eventually gets the title Night Skies. And this sequel was an alien movie, as Close Encounters was. Due to a clause in his contract, however, that he had signed for his next movie, which would become ET, Spielberg was not allowed to direct another movie while he was in pre-production on that one. Wait, sorry, so he was on pre-production on E.T. The timeline is a bit confusing. I think what happened is that he was under contract to do another movie, but it wasn't exactly set what it would be at that time. Because he had this Knight's Skies script and he was kind of shopping it around as maybe not the main one that he was going to work on. So what he actually does is he approaches Toby Hooper to join Knight's Skies as the director. Toby Hooper is a young director at the time. He's 39 years old from Austin, Texas. He had, however, proven his medal as,

a horror director, thanks to a little movie in 1974, called... The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Bingo. It was a massive box office hit. This was not a studio movie. This was very, yeah, independent, low budget. He'd also followed this up with a 1979's two-part miniseries, Salem's Lot, and some other also small budget horror movies that had also done decently well.

So, anyway, Spielberg goes to Hooper and says, I've got this alien movie. Hooper's like, no, I don't want to do that. But he had been thinking for a while, almost eight years to be exact, about developing a ghost movie. And he had a lot of ideas about it. So, interestingly enough, and this is the sort of chicken egg situation I was referring to, Night Sky's the script that he originally took to Hooper is what becomes E.T. Oh.

So E.T. did kind of begin as a close encounter's sequel. Interesting. What ends up happening is that through work, working with Toby Hooper about the ideas that he had kind of been gestating for eight years, that's where Poltergeist comes from. But there are a lot of similarities to E.T. that you end up seeing. It's a family. They're relatively isolated.

Suburban California. The story is told heavily from the kids' perspective. To me, it's almost like they're two sides of the same coin because with E.T. it's like you let you let the foreign entity in and it ends up making you better and sort of the humans are the villains. In this one, you let the foreign entity in and it's very bad. Yes, yes, it is. The kids are interestingly like they line up in a weird way. You have the high school boy and E.T.

but girl in this. And then you have the middle child boy who's like 10 or 12 and then the little girl, the Drew Barrymore character obviously in E.T. So it all lines up. Drew Barrymore almost got the role in Poltergeist. Oh, well, not getting it might have saved her life. Yeah, it's probably for the best. She was up for it. She didn't get it.

We'll talk about who did get it in just a little bit. So based on Hooper's suggestion of a paranormal ghost story, and also reportedly with a lot of his input, Spielberg, Grace, and Victor get to work on writing Poltergeist, the movie that Hooper had always wanted to helm. Here's where things get a little dicey in terms of who actually directed Poultergeist. We're going to knock out this little controversy first. Because of Spielberg's major influence from day one, the rumors begin to swirl that this is not really Hooper's movie.

Spielberg does do a lot, if not most of the storyboards, although many say Hooper did at least half and was part of the discussion throughout. There's different takes on that. Even so, that's very unusual for a producer to do any of the storyboards in a film. And the fact that he co-wrote the script just goes to show how much influence he had. Well, look, it's pretty clear from the beginning that Sveilberg wanted to make this movie and contractually he couldn't. And you got to think that's a rough position for Toby Hooper. It's like, I'm really going to go work with like the best new director in Hollywood where he's going to be, you know, peering over my shoulder as I shoot this thing. That's exactly right. And remember that this is Toby Hooper's first big studio movie ever.

Spielberg is also on set pretty much every day during the shooting of the movie. By all accounts, Hooper was actually totally okay with this while they were shooting. He felt it was a collaborative effort and that he was still in the director's chair. However, when the LA Times comes to visit the set, they then paint a very different picture of it. Hooper always said that that's where the rumor had started and that he didn't feel uncomfortable at all prior to seeing the LA Times article come out. So this is also not to say that Spielberg was a jerk about this. I mean, Chris, to your point, like, Toby Hooper is not in a position to tell Steven Spielberg to stand down. Spielberg is huge. And I think Spielberg was super passionate about the project, and he had a hard time stepping back when he

maybe should have, although the end result is amazing. Well, and also, I mean, Spielberg, you can see a world where they did kind of co-direct it, and that's what makes it so great, because all of the family scenes. Yeah, are Spielberg. are so good. And like, when the ghost is fun at first, I love those moments in the kitchen early on when mom's setting up the experiments. That's such a great misdirect. And so then for Toby Hooper to be able to lean into the horror of like the tree consuming the child, you know, there are so many good horrific moments, the body horror of, um, that one paranormal investigator looking in the mirror and his face is rotting. Like maybe the reality is this really was a collaborative process. And that is what

allowed it to be such an impactful horror film because it's filled with characters that you truly care about. So you mentioned that scene in the bathroom and he has some kind of night terror and he starts shredding his face off in the mirror. Those are actually Steven Spielberg's hands. Oh, really? What happened was they had one shot at getting that right. They built this very expensive model and it was like a torso and then you had to sort of shove your hands up underneath where the arms would be and pull the face off. The guy who was playing, that character started to get kind of nervous about messing it up. And so Steven Spielberg was like, I'll do it.

And that those are his hands. And there's actually a picture. You can see Spielberg underneath that thing ripping the skin off the face. Oh, that's awesome. Well, and it's a very Raiders of the Lost Dark effect. You know what I mean? So it feels very much like it comes from that world. And I love that how that scene starts with it when the steak starts crawling.

Yeah. And then the maggots come out of it. So it's such good effects. So according to Toby's friend Mark Garris about Spielberg on the set of Poltergeist, he said, quote, yes, I would see him climb on the camera and say, you know, maybe we should push in on a two shot here, do this or do that there, and Toby would be watching. But Toby was always calling action and cut. Toby had been deeply involved in all the pre-production and everything, but Stephen is a guy who will come in and call the shots. So evidently, this is not the first time that this had happened on a movie Spielberg was producing but not directing. Reportedly, Kurt Russell on the set of used cars in 1980, called it out and said that he could either take direction,

from Zemeckis, who was the director, or Spielberg, but not both. What is this movie? Look up Used Cars. It's a Robert... Oh, my God. I've seen this poster before. I truly don't even... Like, I don't even know what it is.

Yeah, I'm good. Let's just move past it. It sounds like something Zemeca, Spielberg, and Russell are ready to forget. Well, it's interesting, though, because, to his credit, Spielberg backed off and basically said, you're totally right when Kurt Russell brought... that up. So I think it's an awareness thing. The problem is, Kurt Russell wasn't in poltergeist, aka nobody was there to speak up for Toby Hooper that way. Garris also said, quote, look, all of the pre-production was done by Toby. Toby was there throughout. Toby's vision is very

much realized there. And Toby got credit because he deserved that credit. Everyone, including Steven Spielberg, said that. That is true. We're going to get to when and how he said that later. So while many in the cast supported Hooper saying he was their director, others in the crew were not so kind. Yeah, I can see the crew, especially if Hooper's working with the actors, I can see the actors deferring to Hooper, but the crew's just going to default to whoever they really think the alpha is on set. Exactly. John Leonetti, who was the first assistant cameraman on the films. Yes, John Leonetti! Yeah. Yes! Okay, my friends and I are obsessed. He directed Annabelle and he was the DP on The Conjuring. So John Leonetti, to be fair, so John Leonetti, I like him as a DP. He

also directed the very famous birdbox slash quiet place maybe rip off one of my favorite movies to watch hi the silence yeah it's incredible you know what drink a couple cans and watch the silence do yourself a favor and go enjoy it he is right so leonetti said quote candidly stephen spielberg directed that movie there's no question however toby hooper i adore I love that man so much. Pretty much everybody really loved Toby Hooper as a person and just said he was incredibly nice and fun to work with. Leonetti also claims there was another even bigger reason Spielberg didn't direct

Poltergeist, and that was an impending director's strike. So that may have been the reason he brought on Hooper. He didn't want to be labeled as the director if it meant he'd have to halt production. Interesting. Yeah, there was less information. Maybe Hooper wasn't DGA and he was DGA, something like that. Well, I don't know because the DGA actually does get involved. They opened an inquiry into whether Spielberg infringed on Hooper's directing credit, and they ruled in favor of Hooper.

Spielberg later writes an open letter to Hooper in which he said, I enjoyed your openness and allowing me a wide berth for creative involvement, just as I know you were happy with the freedom you had to direct Poltergeist so wonderfully. You performed responsibly and professionally throughout, and I wish you great success on your next project. It's a weird open letter. Okay. Fair enough, Stephen. Yeah. So my guess is exactly what you set up at the top, which is that Spielberg did, in fact, pretty much direct a lot of the family sequences and that Toby Hooper was responsible for a lot of the horror and also a lot of the ideation behind it.

So I don't think it's fair to say that, oh, you know, Toby Hooper was just, you know, checked out and didn't direct the movie. No, I don't think that's true. It sounds like we kind of got the best of both worlds. I think that's accurate. So go Toby Hooper and go Steve's Gilbert. for not having so like too much of an ego and like shutting things down you know he made a great movie uh and i think if he you know by allowing spielberg to have that freedom on set it only enhanced his project and guess what at the end of the day he gets that directing credit so right

you know but good for him but sad that it's it's been sort of marred all these years by people saying he didn't do it um yeah yeah ultimately he can't control that i think he can only control it i mean i think I'm guessing he would prefer a good movie plus a rumor. Yeah. You know what I mean? To something different. I'd like to take a moment to shout out my favorite beverage that I look forward to literally every day. And that is can.

It is a cannabis infused, delicious, bubbly treat. It is higher in CBD. And it's got like two milligrams of THC. It's just a nice little buzz while you're sitting on your bed couch. Yeah, our couch is a bed. It's also a really nice substitute to reach for instead of a glass of wine. Can find it and buy them. Stop complaining to me about it.

God, and send me more cans. All right. So now that we've gotten through all the typical what went wrong, garbage, let's talk about the spooky happenings on set. Okay, so Joe Beth Williams in a Reddit AMA in 2015, said that there were some unusual happenings in the apartment she rented during the filming of Poltergeist. And Jobbeth Williams plays the mom in the movie, Diane.

Yeah. She said, scariest thing that happened to me during poltergeist shooting. Well, because we were supposed to be scared so much, I think everybody's nerves were hypersensitive. I didn't live in L.A. then, so I was in a rented apartment. And I began to notice that every night when I would come home from shooting, the pictures on the walls would be crooked.

And I would straighten them. And the next day, I would come in and the pictures would be crooked again. So that always made me feel a little nervous about the place I was staying. And then she makes it not fun and says she thinks it's because she was slamming the door every time she left the apartment and they were all changing. But, Jo Beth, I'm not buying it because I don't think every picture in your apartment goes crooked when you slam the front door, unless your apartment is made of paper. I think Toby Hooper was sneaking in and moving it just to get her into the right headspace. Also, not spooky, but definitely uncomfortable for Jobebeth

Williams, the scene where it looks like she's being dragged across the ceiling. Yes, towards the end. It's a really great shot. It's amazing. So it's called a gimbal set, and it basically was just a room that was set like a hamster wheel, and then it would just spin 360 degrees. So she's literally just rolling around a room full of furniture. And apparently that was awful, but it looks incredible. That's what they had Joseph Gordon Levitt doing in Inception.

Yeah, but this movie's way better. Yes, it is. Poltergeist over Inception every day. Oh, 100%. Yeah. One more on-set mishap. Chris, you mentioned this scene earlier. What would you say is the scariest scene in the movie?

I think it's the clown. Yes. The clown's in the chair. The little boy, Robbie, throws his jacket on the clown, and then all of a sudden it's gone when he wakes back up. And it's the worst thing that's ever happened to me as a viewer when I was a child watching that. It's terrifying. And then shortly thereafter, the clown sort of strangles Robbie.

Mm-hmm. So they built a... a mechanical clown doll, which was designed to wrap and tighten its arms around Robbie, played by Oliver Robbins. Turns out they built it a little too well. It was a bit too good at choking children. Oh, God. The doll actually malfunctioned and started cutting off Oliver's airway. Oh, Jesus. So he started yelling that he couldn't breathe, but Spielberg and Hooper both thought that he was improvising. It was only when... Like the nine-year-old kid? Yeah. It was only when Spielberg noticed that his face was turning blue that he stepped in and pried the doll off of him.

Oh, my God. That is terrifying. Although I'm sure there was like some weirdo on set who took that doll home for like autoerotic asphyxiation or something like that. Well, it would be great at it because evidently all it could do was choke. So that's that's sort of the spooky weird things that happened on set. Overall, though, sounds like everybody enjoyed working on the movie. Everybody liked each other.

Joe Beth Williams, when asked in that same AMA if she and Craig T. Nelson were still friends, she said yes very much, and that Craig T. Nelson had even helped her son get golfing lessons at a local country club. Well, you know, Craig, really stepping up when people needs you. I love Craig T. Nelson. He's great. I love him. He does Mr. Incredible, yeah? Yeah. Yeah, so good. Well, I have a feeling that everything going so well on set is about to be shattered by this curse of the poltergeist. That is correct.

So the movie comes out. June 4th, 1982. It is a big hit. It grosses over 75 million worldwide, and it spawns a franchise, which leads us into the poltergeist curse. I can't say poltergeist curse. It is like a, whatever.

Something sinister hangs over this franchise, Chris. Okay, so the curse kicks off only a few months after the release of the movie on November 4, 1982. Things are about to get upsetting for anybody that's listening. Dominique Dunn, who played the older sister in the film, had begun dating a man named John Sweeney only a year earlier in 1981,

so either right before she'd been cast in or when she was working on Poltergeist. They moved in together quickly in her house in West Hollywood, and that is about where the romance stopped. Sweeney swiftly revealed himself to be emotionally and physically abusive. He was prone to jealous rages, including once just after the film was released, when a fan of the movie excitedly approached Dominique in a restaurant,

a fan of Poltergeist. He picked up this fan and physically shook them. I hope the fan was not like under 15. That's like just terrifying. I mean, she was young. I think a lot of fans of her in this movie were also young. Like high school kids. Yeah.

Towards the end of their relationship, Sweeney attempted to strangle Dominique with guests in the house who ran in and saw what was happening. He denied it. She escaped through a window and went to stay with her mother. She told him the relationship was over. On November 4th, Dominique was rehearsing with actor David Packer inside her house. Sweeney showed up and asked to speak with Dominique on the porch.

She agreed while Packer stayed inside. Packer ran outside after hearing screaming and fighting to find Sweeney standing over Dominique. He had strangled and beaten her. She was taken off life support a few days later and died. Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's awful. I think she was like 21 or 22. She was really young.

Did he at least go to jail forever? Oh, he went for about three years, Chris. What? Yeah. What? You know, a lover's quarrel, right? Anyway. Oh, my God.

Donate to some domestic violence groups because this shit still happens. Yeah, he... Is he alive still? I think he has... since died, but he had been a chef at a successful restaurant in Los Angeles when she met him. And after he got out of jail,

he actually got a job at another restaurant as like a head chef. And her family showed up outside that restaurant every day with signs saying this chef murdered our daughter and the restaurant fired him. And then he went, yeah, good for them. And then he went and changed his name

and got to have, by all accounts, a relatively normal life. Yeah, you know, if he's not dead, I hope he gets coronavirus. Okay, let's keep going. I think he is dead. But, yeah, let's give him coronavirus anyway. So, moving on to the next victim of potentially the poltergeist curse. I also want to say, I'm not making light of any of these deaths that are attached to the film.

This is something that people discuss because it is a very strange coincidence that seems to hang over the franchise. Yeah. So, Heather O'Rourke, the little girl who played Carol. Anne would also suddenly and strangely pass away a few years later in 1988. In 1987, she was misdiagnosed with Crohn's disease, only to collapse from cardiac arrest in 1988. When taken to the hospital, she died during a surgery to correct a bowel obstruction. And it was believed that she'd been suffering from basically a congenital intestinal

abnormality for a couple of years at that point. Jesus. So she was like, what, 12 years old at that point? Yeah, I think she was like 12. Really sad. She was really good. I think she had just, maybe just finished filming Poultergeist 3. I'm not exactly sure, but, you know, definitely not fair, not what anybody expected.

And completely, like, they were blindsided by this. They had no idea that. Right, of course. 12 years old. So, in Poultergeist 2, the other side, released in 1986, the villain, Reverend Kane, played by Julian Beck is a human manifestation of the beast in the first movie, which is like, eh, it's kind of like a retrofitted villain, but remember that skeleton thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that comes out of the closet, like, at the very end. At mom, yeah, yeah.

So by the second movie, they turn around and they're like, oh, that was the beast. And then here's the human version. But anyway, he's great. And he has this very, like, skeletal appearance about him that makes him very scary. Turns out it was due to the fact that he was battling stomach cancer. Oh, Jesus. During filming, he passed away shortly after filming wrapped before they could ever even have him ADR some lines. So they had to use a sound-alike actor to fill in for him.

But he was awesome. He did a great job. That one, I don't know if we can qualify that as Poltergeist Curse because he'd been battling it like years prior to doing the film. Now, this is one of the weirdest ones. Richard Lawson, who plays another one of the paranormal investigators. He's the one who actually sticks around. and helps them at the end, not the one that peels his face off.

Got it. Yes. Survived a rather crazy plane crash in 1992. The fact that he dodged the curse may be due to a flight attendant who recognized him from poltergeist and upgraded him from his original seat to first class. No. Yep. He would later find out that at least one person in his original row had died, along with 26 other people who died when U.S. Air Flight 405 to Cleveland from LaGuardia,

botched its takeoff and ended up trying to emergency land, flipping repeatedly on the runway, and then crash landing in Flushing Bay. And let's hear him talk about what he thinks about this incident. I heard about the curse. And then I get in a plane crash, wind up trapped in my seat underwater for the longest time. And I survive. And there's 27 people who die and 24 people who live and going back to poltergeist, you know, is there some correlation? Death seemed to follow the films. We're not going to go off the deep end on that plane crash, but it was bizarre. He's talked about it to some extent, and he said that basically, he flew all the time.

He was an actor. He was flying between the coasts all the time. But he got a bad feeling as soon as he got on the plane. He was noticing that like some things just weren't happening quite right. And he said he just, he was. Like, he was essentially preparing himself for a crash, like, as soon as he got on. And some other people on the plane said the same thing, that they just had a really bad feeling from the get-go. The fourth death associated with the franchise was Will Sampson, who played Taylor, the Native American Shaman, in Poultergeist 2.

He was also in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Yes. Yeah, he's amazing. Amazing. One of the best characters and performances, like, of that era. He died only a year after the release of Poltergeist 2, I believe, in 1987 during a lung transplant surgery. So again, this is another thing where it's like this was a medical procedure and unfortunately he didn't make it through. But the deaths do keep piling up in 2009, Lou Perryman, an actor who had a small role in the first film and who was actually a crew member on Texas Chainsaw Massacre was murdered with an axe in his home in Austin, Texas, in a random.

Home Invasion. Oh, my God. The curse actually even extends itself all the way to the Poltergeist's much maligned reboot in 2015, starring Sam Rockwell and Rosemary DeWitt. Yes. I love Rosemary DeWitt. She's great. The director, Gil Keenan, describes some disturbing happenings during production.

So electrical abnormalities were evidently very common on set, particularly when shooting on and around a weird field that the housing community was built around. Sometimes when they were trying to set up lights and turn them on for shooting, they would just immediately blow out. Also, whenever he flew drones over the field, the crew said that they never could get a GPS signal. But once the craft had cleared the field, the signal would come back. Great. Yeah.

Keenan also reported that the house he'd rented, just like Jobeath Williams, appeared to be legitimately haunted. A woman dressed in all black appeared to him just a few days after filming some. started and reappeared throughout. When he left and the original owners moved back in, they called him to ask if he'd seen anything strange. Evidently, the ghost had stuck around for them. So it's interesting because he says that she didn't follow him back to L.A., but he believes very strongly that she did follow him back from set, which goes back to the original thing

about poltergeist not haunting places so much as they haunt people. So here is the possible and popular explanation for this supposed Poltergeist. Ultra Geist curse. Do you know this, Chris? I don't. I'm very excited. Okay. It comes from a set piece on the first film. While production spared no expense on some set pieces, like the aforementioned face ripping, was extremely expensive and also the model that they built to create the house at the very end when it gets sort of crumpled into a oblivion. That was actually like a gigantic

model. And they had one take to get it right. They sucked it back into a giant industrial vacuum while firing shotguns at least. It looks awesome. It looks great. Because of those very expensive moments, they did cut corners on some other set pieces. Now, think back to the clip I played at the very top of this episode. What was the reason that the poltergeist began haunting the house in the first place? Because they'd built it on a cemetery and they'd left the bodies.

They just took away the headstones. Bingo. You left the bodies, didn't you? Now, doesn't it seem like the people who wrote an entire movie about that would know better than to misuse human bodies on their own set. Oh, no. No. Oh, God.

All right. So do you do this time, Toby? Do you remember the scene where Joe Beth Williams is in the pool and all of a sudden skeletons pop up? Yes, it terrified me as a kid. Fantastic. So those are real skeletons. Oh, I thought you were going to say that.

Oh, no. It's so mad. They are real bodies. They are real human corpses. evidently it was significantly cheaper to buy actual dead bodies than to buy good-looking replicas. That is, it makes sense, but it's also such a bummer. Does it? By the way, Joveth Williams had no idea that she was swimming with actual courses.

They didn't tell her. They didn't tell her. She always thought they were fake. I mean, she didn't ask. She assumed that they were rubber. that shouldn't be something you have to ask no it shouldn't yeah she thought they were fake

she had no idea and a lot of the crew also didn't know when they found out later they were horrified because she said that scene took like four days to shoot and she was like muddy every day she's like you know chumming around

with the skeletons that's what I'm funny I bet you there was a moment where she like she was just so bored she like put her arm around the skeleton and it's like hey guys and she's like kissing it on the head and like joking around and like whoever did like Steven Spielberg's in the corner like don't tell her don't tell her don't tell her I think that's possibly right that's just oh god okay so to be fair they are not actually the first movie to use real skeletons

that is evidently more common than I realized dawn of the dead actually did it by accident evidently the original dawn of the dead and found out later that a body was was used what happened there was the guy who was like buying props was buying a skeleton that was used in one scene and he got it from this like, this like shady prop house that just had this really good looking skeleton that for some reason was very cheap. You want skeletons, we got skeletons. Yeah. So he was like fantastic. He buys it. They use it. Later on, I think he tried to like donate it to a different prop house or do something and it ended up in like a window of some kind of costume shop. And then a police officer, I could be getting this wrong, but I think a police officer walking by was like,

that looks like a real body. Who did you murder? And went in and then it got tested. And sure enough, it was like an unidentified, essentially missing person. Like, they don't know. My God. I just love the history of these people who are hired to like source very weird things for movies. Like the guys, like, we need a shock.

Go get us a shark. And they're like, it's like, no one on set is going to ask questions. Just like figure out how to get a shark. there by Monday or a skeleton there by Tuesday. And boy, do they do it. They found a whole bunch of skeletons. Here's a bunch of petty cash. Just bring us skeletons.

House on Haunted Hill, the old one, and Frankenstein also both used real skeletons as well. Evidently, the ones that were used in Poultergeist were like medical skeletons that were supposed to be used for, you know, the study of the human anatomy. But instead, they got like, rubber and blood glued to them. and they got to swim in the mud with Joe Beth Williams. I can see like they're telling the family's like, and they'll be donated to science.

It'll go to a good cause. It's like, throw them in the fucking pool. And they just sold them to Steven Spielberg for Poltergeist. So back to Will Sampson, who we were just talking about a minute ago, who is the Native American actor who played the shaman in Poltergeist 2.

He's also one of the four deaths associated with the curse. Now, in addition to being a shaman in the film, He was a descendant of, I might get this wrong, I'm so sorry, the Muskegee Creek Nation. And by several accounts that I read a shaman in real life, or at least practiced some shamanistic rituals, he had grown concerned about the use of real skeletons in the first movie. And evidently, the rest of the crew was as well, because there were some creepy things happening on Poltergeist 2. So one night, he asked that everyone leave him alone on set so that he could perform an episode. exorcism, and here is Joe Beth Williams on that. Will Sampson did come in and do the exorcism, and he wanted to be alone, and he did it in the middle of the night. And I have to say

that when everybody came in the next day to shoot, there was a feeling of relief. Well, good for Will Samson. Yeah, he may have taken care of it. Also, I believe that that is one of the reasons why the director of The Conjuring brought in a priest to bless the set. We're going to get to the conjuring on the later episode because, yes, there were for sure some mishaps, some spooky mishaps that happened behind the scenes there. Speaking of spooky mishaps, something a little creepy actually did happen to me while I was researching Poultergeist. While I was doing this research on my laptop, I noticed that the green camera light on my computer was on. I hadn't realized it for a few minutes. As soon as I saw it, I tried to see if I had any apps open that might be using my

camera. I did not. So I put my finger over it. I quit everything. I restarted, turned it back on, and it was gone. So there you go. That's my little poltergeist experience. Probably the NSA. They're terrifying. Well, that pretty much wraps it up for for poltergeist. Wait, I'm sorry, Chris. There is one more very important detail. Please. I'm excited. Now, I'm sure you remember from the film, Implosion Man Number One. Well, this critical character was in fact played by one of our favorites of the show, Jeffrey Bannister. No! Yes. Your high school friend's dad again strikes in one of our movies.

What? How did he walk away from a storied Hollywood career? I don't know. David and I rolled it back many times to try and identify Implosion Man number one. one. And we believe him to be one of the hooded men who right before the house does implode. It like shoots a blast out before it goes in. And you see three guys go like, and get blown back under the yard. And I think the one closest to the camera is him. Amazing. As always now, we need to go into our famed what went right sequence to cap this episode off. Lizzie, there's a lot to choose from here. So what went right for the poultry geist?

For the poultry geist? You know, I think it's the quieter moments that I didn't remember as a kid that are the moments that scared me so much more this time. Like when you're talking about the clown scene, the moment you actually highlighted as being the scariest is not when it grabs him. It's when he looks at the clown in the chair, looks away, looks back, and the clown is gone. The other thing, which is the exact same trick,

and they actually did this completely practically in the movie, is early on, I think the sixth sense borrows heavily from this scene. But Joe Beth Williams and Heather O'Rourke are in the kitchen. The chairs. And all of a sudden Joe Beth Williams looks back at the dining table. All the chairs have been pushed back, and she's like, did you do this? A little girl's like, no.

and so Joe Beth Williams goes back, pushes all the chairs back in, and then in one take, you see her turn, and it is, she doesn't go very far. She turns away. She looks in the cabinet. She turns back and all of the chairs are stacked on top of the dining room table. That was, that was real. I don't know how they did it. It's so effective.

They glued together one structure. So it was like. Flew it in, like a couple grips. Yeah. They flew all of the chairs out and then they flew the one with all the chairs balanced in. But they do. that. If you count it, it's like six seconds. Like, it is nuts that they were able to do it. But those moments that are sort of the quieter ones, they're so well done. They're so scary. I really loved

it. Yeah. I think for me, whatever dynamic Spielberg and Hooper ended up having on set, it just worked. And it doesn't surprise me that, you know, Spielberg was heavily involved. And so for what went right, I would just say Toby Hooper navigating it in a way where he came out of it. with an amazing movie and a great reputation amongst the people that he worked with. And I think that's, you know, a pretty remarkable accomplishment. And it's why the movie holds up so well. The horror still is horrific and the family stuff makes it timeless. Yeah. I agree. I think the ultimate what went right for this really is that it was a

collaborative effort between them and you got the best of both worlds. Absolutely. Now, if you enjoyed hearing about poltergeist, the potential but probably not real hauntings on set and the possibly just a coincidence curse, get ready for a special treat that we have coming for you a little later this month, which is that Chris and I are going to share some of our own spooky ghost experiences. Now, we would love, if you would like to send us your own stories, we would be happy to either read them or play them on air. Email them to What Went WrongPod at gmail.com and I will read them like this. Oh, I don't want to know what else you use that voice for. You're welcome. Send me your ghosts.

Guys, as always, thank you for listening. Don't forget to leave a rating and a review. I know we give you a hard time about the reviews sometimes, but that's just because we're going to hold you to the same standards that your parents did. So please continue to do so. And as always, if you have any recommendations, hit us up. Instagram at What Went Wrong Pod and Gmail. What Went Wrong Pod at Gmail.com.

What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Euthanononon you us.