Transcription
The 1982 horror classic Poltergeist has been frightening audiences for over 40 years. The special effects bonanza brought ghosts to life. Or should we say afterlife in a way that moviegoers had never seen before?
But ever since its release, the movie has been haunted by rumors of a curse that has allegedly wreaked havoc on the cast and crew. Like a vengeful spirit with lethal results. So today we're making contact with the infamous poltergeist curse.
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All right, everybody, they're weird. After director Steven Spielberg made the sci-fi blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Columbia Pictures wanted a sequel, which didn't really interest the young filmmaker. Instead, he proposed an alien invasion horror movie called Night Skies. This project never came to fruition, but ideas developed for Night Skies ended up influencing two other massively popular films from the 1980s: Spielberg's own E.T. and the Tobe Hooper, Ghost Freakout, Poltergeist.
Now E.T.'s legacy is mostly cute imagery and Reese's Pieces, but Poltergeist’s legacy is marred by tragedy, death, and allegedly a curse. Rumors about a curse associated with the Poltergeist franchise are largely attributable to a number of tragedies that have impacted the film's cast members over the years. But all of these individual tragedies might have been written off as coincidence if they'd all befallen actors from a different movie franchise. Say, one that wasn't about ghosts and curses. The Poltergeist films are thematically centered on curses, which makes the macabre connection all too easy to make.
The first film in the series follows the Freeling family as they move to a planned community in Cuesta Verde, California, after the father, Steve, gets a lucrative new gig selling real estate. The family soon began experiencing paranormal phenomena in their new home, while five-year-old daughter Carol Anne makes personal contact with the spirit world. Ultimately, with the aid of various mediums, parapsychologists, and supernatural experts, the Freelings discover their new residents, along with much of the surrounding neighborhood, was constructed by greedy developers atop a former cemetery. Rather than exhuming the bodies and moving them to a new location, the homes were simply plopped right on top of the corpses in their graves. So the house was not simply haunted, but plagued by a ghostly curse, which is really going to impact the resale value, no matter how good the schools are.
The film's sequel picked up and ran with the curse theme. Poltergeist Two: The Other Side finds the Freelings responding to their continued hauntings by seeking help from a Native American shaman who shows them how to repel the curse via magical artifacts and charmed weapons. At one point during the production, actor Will Sampson, who portrayed the shaman character Taylor, claimed that he felt a malevolent presence on the set and performed his own small exorcism ceremony. Craig Nelson, who played Steve Freeling, claimed that following Sampson's exorcism, the unsettling presence on the set seemed to disappear.
In the original 1982 film's production, ten-year-old actor Oliver Robins, who portrayed the Freeling middle child Robbie, was actually choked on set by a malfunctioning mechanical clown. What's worse, because the scene in question featured the animatronic clown attacking Robbie, the cast and crew on set assumed they were simply seeing Robins' incredible acting skills on display. No one realized he was in any actual danger until the boy started turning blue. Fortunately, they were able to react in time, and Robins survived the incident unscathed, physically.
In a 2022 Vanity Fair piece looking back on the original movie, JoBeth Williams, who played Diane Freeling, recalled shooting a scene set in a muddy pit in the haunted home's backyard, where the bodies beneath the foundation begin surfacing all around her and springing to life. While originally shooting the scene, Williams assumed that her skeletal costars were fabricated by the film's prop department. It was only many years later, while speaking to a former Poltergeist VFX team member, that she realized she'd been in a pool surrounded by real human skeletons. Believe it or not, using authentic human remains to aid in film production was not an unheard-of practice. It's generally cheaper than building a prop skeleton, but nonetheless, the parallels between the movie's idea of badly treated corpses triggering a haunting, and what subsequently happened with the Poltergeist cast can't be entirely ignored. Poltergeist Two was also produced with the aid of real skeletons. Because Hollywood loves a sequel.
The concept of a cursed movie franchise sounds like it could just be a bit of fun or even a clever way to keep the franchise alive. No pun intended. But the sad truth is the notion of a Poltergeist curse has lingered on in the popular imagination because of a string of real-world tragedies.
The most infamous case associated with the franchise concerns young Heather O'Rourke, who played Carol Anne. The young actress was just five years old when Spielberg spotted her in the MGM commissary, where she was hanging out with her mom while older sister Tammy shot the musical flop, Pennies from Heaven. While Spielberg and his fellow producers had been considering Drew Barrymore for the Carol Anne role, Spielberg immediately felt that O'Rourke was ideal for the part. Barrymore wound up being cast in the movie's unofficial sister project, E.T., and her eerie delivery of the classic line, "They're here," consistently ranks on lists of memorable movie dialogue. She went on to appear in both of the Poltergeist theatrical sequels, along with a number of other notable TV projects for the remainder of her life.
In early 1987, O'Rourke fell ill well in the middle of filming Poltergeist Three and started experiencing digestive and intestinal problems. An infection of giardiasis, likely contracted from well, water near her home in California's Big Bear Lake, resulted in a diagnosis of Crohn's disease. One year later, O'Rourke collapsed in her home and suffered a cardiac arrest. It was only then discovered that she suffered from a rare and severe birth defect, stenosis of the intestine, and sadly, she did not recover, passing away at age 12.
Dominique Dunne was in her early twenties when she won the role of the Freeling family's teenage daughter, Dana. Dunne made her acting debut in the TV movie Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker and had scored a few other supporting roles in the interim. But Poltergeist was going to be her big break. After the film proved a smash hit at the box office, Dunne agreed to appear in the film sequel and signed on for a role in the future blockbuster TV mini-series V. But this promising career came to a shocking end in October of 1982, when Dunne was strangled to death by her ex-boyfriend, John Thomas Sweeney, outside of her home in West Hollywood, California, just four months after Poltergeist was released. The case generated significant media attention, with Sweeney claiming he had acted in the heat of passion, but prosecutors pointing consistently to a history of violence and domestic abuse. Ultimately, Sweeney was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and misdemeanor assault rather than second-degree murder, and was released from prison on parole after serving just three years and seven months for the crime. The case provoked outrage. Dominique's mother, Ellen Dunne, founded the victims' rights advocacy group Justice for Homicide Victims. Her father, Dominick Dunne, who had worked through the early 1980s as a film producer, published a book based on the journals he kept throughout the Sweeney trial and its aftermath. This led to an entirely new career for him, writing about the intersection of wealth and crime from the perspective of victims and their families. He went on to work for decades as an author and regular Vanity Fair contributor, and his work was massively influential on the current true crime craze.
Any member of any of the film's ensemble casts can theoretically be impacted by the Poltergeist Curse, not just the leads. For example, actor Lou Perryman costars as Pugsley in the original film, a construction worker who helps build the Freeling family pool. Perryman previously appeared in The Blues Brothers and was actually a crew member on the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, also directed by Hooper, which probably explains how Perryman found himself in Poltergeist. In April of 2009, Perryman was randomly killed in his Austin, Texas, home by a total stranger. 28-year-old ex-con Seth Christopher Tatum, who had a history of both mental illness and drug problems, had attacked his mother's ex-boyfriend with a pair of garden shears and a fireplace poker earlier that day. He broke into the 67-year-old Perryman’s South Austin home, hoping to steal his car and make a getaway. But before grabbing the keys to the actor's 1994 Geo, Tatum first grabbed an ax and struck Perryman over ten times. When he was apprehended in the car the next day, Tatum confessed to a sheriff's deputy that it was stolen and he had slain its original owner.
Actor Julian Beck, who portrays the villainous preacher Reverend Henry Cain in Poltergeist 2, passed away shortly after appearing in the film at age 60 after a two-year battle with stomach cancer. The fact that Beck's illness developed before he ever appeared in the Poltergeist franchise hasn't done much to discourage the curse rumors.
Other members of the Poltergeist ensemble have also reported strange incidents that didn't result in their untimely demise. JoBeth Williams claims that after shooting scenes for Poltergeist, she would return home to find her own house inexplicably in disarray. In one incident, she claimed that all of the picture frames on the walls were tilted, and after she straightened them, they were all tilted once again the next day. Fortunately, no one was injured in this serial frame-tilting attack.
Actor Richard Lawson plays Ryan, a member of the Paranormal Investigation Team looking into the Freelings' claims about the haunted house in the original Poltergeist. In March of 1992, Lawson was on board U.S. Air Flight 405, bound from New York to Cleveland, when it crashed shortly after liftoff from LaGuardia Airport. Fortunately, Lawson was among the survivors. He was booked in coach for the flight, but recognized by a ticket attendant while preparing to board and bumped up to first class. The move quite possibly saved his life. Of the 27 people who perished during the crash, one was in Lawson's originally assigned row of seats.
Okay, that is spooky. We're just going to go turn on some lights. So what do you think? Is the Poltergeist curse real or just another ghost story? Let us know in the comments below. And while you're at it, check out some of these other videos from our Weird History.