It’s common practice to refer to horror films where there were significant problems during production as “cursed.” The streaming service Shudder has an entire series devoted to this concept. As it happens, focusing on events surrounding horror movies exclusively is unnecessary. You can find uncanny occurrences across all genres.
We’ll be looking both behind the curtain and at the content of programming released for public consumption. Whether it be the private lives of actors or the names in a script, there are plenty of occurrences on both the small and big screen that will make you wonder if there’s something very strange at work behind our understanding of reality. More than a few will make you wonder if that thing is sinister indeed.
10. Roundhay Garden
Our first stop is at the very birth of cinema, if not sooner. The first piece of motion picture film ever shot from a single camera (so early in the process that it was printed on paper instead of celluloid film) Roundhay Garden was a two second long sequence by inventor Louis Le Prince, shot in the front yard of his in-laws in 1888 in Leeds, England. Louis’s mother-in-law Sarah Whitely and son Adolphe Le Prince are on screen, with Adolphe walking parallel to the camera and Sarah and her husband dancing. To watch it today, you wouldn’t suspect that the first motion picture seemed to bestow a sort of curse upon its cinematographer and stars.
Within ten days, Sarah Whitely died. Indeed, she had collapsed from the heat during the process of shooting the film, and spent her last ten days trying to recover from it. Within two years, Louis Le Prince disappeared from a train on September 16, 1890, while on a trip to arrange a screening in New York City which would have been the first public exhibition of his invention. As if that weren’t enough tragedy for a home movie, eleven years after that, Adolphe died very suspiciously while out hunting. Even at the time, there was considerable speculation that no less than Thomas Edison had done in Louis Le Prince to get rid of a competitor for his own cinematic inventions and then his rival’s son to put a stop to investigations, but no conclusive evidence has ever been brought to public attention.
9. The Tall Target
John Kennedy has to save newly-elected president Abraham Lincoln from assassination. Sounds like a wacky time travel comedy? It’s not, it’s the premise of Anthony Mann’s historical crime thriller The Tall Target, starring Dick Powell as Police Sergeant John Kennedy. If it seems like ridiculous pandering, consider that the movie was released in 1951, back when Kennedy was a representative in the US House and before the publication of Profiles in Courage which would do so much to increase his national prominence.
The events of the film are loosely based on a real event. Specifically the process of moving Lincoln to Washington DC for his 1861 inauguration under heightened alert because the Pinkerton Agency had caught word that there was an attempt planned on the extremely polarizing president’s life. It became known as the Baltimore Plot, for the period of the journey on February 22, 1861 spent on the Baltimore rail line. There was no Police Sergeant John Kennedy involved, though there was a H. F. Kenney who accompanied the Pinkertons during the escort mission. Part of Kenney’s contribution was giving a carriage driver intentionally bad directions in case the driver was intending to bring them into an ambush, which would have potential for the setup to a wacky comedy instead of the taut thriller Mann intended.
8. All My Children
With more than 10,700 episodes of melodrama over its run from 1970 to 2011, there was plenty of room for morbidness both on and off camera to happen. Unquestionably the most morbid began in August 1997. During an episode that month, actress Eva LaRue’s character Maria Santos was on a plane. It crashed, and she did not survive. In a moment that probably would not be included today, her significant other Edmund was reassured that at least she would live on through her children, which were “the greatest gift she could have given.”
Fast forward to September 10, 2001. Eva LaRue was booked for a flight on American Airlines Flight 11. Because she was eight months pregnant with her daughter Kaya (she’d been in New York City for a baby shower) she wanted to sleep in and rescheduled her flight at the last moment. As a result, she rescheduled her way out of being one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center, as she later tweeted about and confirmed in an interview. If this sounds familiar, it’s because a similar narrow miss happened to Seth McFarlane. For her part, LaRue claimed that the brush with death was the kind of experience that “took the fear out of you.”
7. Poltergeist
While the intro said the list wouldn’t focus on horror movies exclusively, there was nothing about excluding them, and the events relating to this 1982 classic are very harrowing. Shortly after the first film’s release in 1982, Dominique Dunne, who played the teenage character Dana, was strangled to death by boyfriend John Thomas Sweeney on the driveway of her home in West Hollywood. Specifically the killing took place on October 30, and in 1986 became a subject of public outcry again when in 1986 he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, and it didn’t even prevent him from returning to his old job as head chef at The Chronicle restaurant. As many pointed out at the time, strangulation was nearly the cause of death for Robbie, Dana’s younger brother in the film, and Oliver Robbins, the actor who reportedly was only prevented from asphyxiating by Steven Spielberg’s intervention.
Arguably even more disturbing was the fate of Heather O’Rourke, who played the character if Carol when she was only seven years old. She would star in all three original Poltergeist movies and become perhaps the most iconic character (if not her then definitely her line “they’re here”). And in 1988, when she was only twelve years old, she passed away during an emergency surgery for an ailment induced by tainted well water. She and her costar were buried in the same cemetery, adding to the sense there was some grim curse on the Poltergeist films.
6. The West Wing
In the final season of this Aaron Sorkin-created drama, the character Leo McGarry, a war criminal and advisor to President Josiah Bartlett, had two heart attacks. One at Camp David where he was left in the woods for several hours, and another on the night of an election where he was the running mate for Matthew Santos, the second one proving fatal for the character. Actor John Spencer was not featured in the scene where his character’s dead body is discovered, because he had passed away before the episode was produced.
John Spencer was just shy of 59 years old at the time of his passing, so he was still relatively young as far as average life expectancy went in 2005. To add to the discomfort of fans giving that final season a rewatch, McGarry says of his campaign staff that they’re going to kill him in an episode that aired days before his passing. According to Martin Sheen, after Spencer passed away, the entire season was rewritten to change the outcome of the season-long election arc.
5. Troy
This 2004 film from Das Boot director Wolfgang Petersen is not very celebrated today. Commercially it was only a success due to worldwide box office, critically it was at best a modest success. I was widely criticized for being a wildly unfaithful adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad by people who never would have read the ancient epic in their lives. Yet there was a curious form of verisimilitude, or maybe if you were a form of method acting, that occurred during the shoot.
During one of the stunts, star Brad Pitt injured his achilles tendon in what he referred to as a “bout of stupid irony,” as a major development in the original Iliad is the character Achilles being brought down by a vulnerability in the same body part. This was no trifling occurrence for the production, as there was shutdown for weeks as he healed. The delay caused even more headaches for Petersen when it kept the crew in place for a hurricane to strike and destroy much of their equipment and sets. It’s surprising that Troy isn’t more remembered for being a cursed movie shoot.
4. Above Suspicion
Christopher Reeve was of course best known for playing all-American hero Superman for four films over a decade. Behind the scenes he bolstered his good guy image through activism such as for Amnesty International and leading a protest march against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Still throughout his career he would be cast in roles that subverted that image such as in 1982’s dark comedy Deathtrap, 1991’s Bump in the Night where he played a child predator, and 1995’s Above Suspicion, where he played a man who married his wife and brother and tried to fake paralysis as an alibi. In what might have been stunt casting, Reeve’s real life wife, Dana Reeve, played a detective investigating his character.
Those with the least familiarity with Reeve’s later life know of his 1995 horse riding accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down. What takes it from the realm of what Brad Pitt called stupid irony to viciously cruel irony is that the injury occurred within days of Above Suspicion’s premiere. For what it’s worth, Dana Reeve said in interviews that she disliked sentimental depictions of Reeve’s misfortune while he was doing charity work for the disabled, so during their time, they seemingly didn’t want anyone’s pity.
3. McMillan & Wife
This police procedural about the married couple Commissioner Stewart McMillan and his wife Sally solving crimes is little discussed today, yet considering it ran from 1971 to 1977 it enjoyed a decently long run. It’s not hard to see why. The fact its episodes were 60-90 minutes meant it was a bit more difficult to syndicate than concurrent police procedurals like Columbo. It also doesn’t help that the movie had Susan St. James’s character Sally and her son killed off over a contract dispute did not reflect too well on the artistic integrity of the production. This decision took on a horribly grim note decades later.
By 2004, Susan St. James had married NBC executive Dick Ebersol and had a fourteen year-old son with him named Teddy. On Thanksgiving weekend that year, St. James’s husband and son were in a plane crash. Dick Ebersol survived, but their son did not. St. James said of the ordeal that her way of dealing with it was to remind herself and her family that they should move past it, and “resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other guy dies.”
2. The Omen
Similar to the hype surrounding The Exorcist during production, there were many stories of how so many things went wrong during the production of The Omen that it seemed as if the forces of Satan were working to sabotage the shoot. As pointed out by Screenrant regarding The Exorcist, many of these supposedly uncanny occurrences were more the result of irresponsible filmmaking and salacious marketing and promotion, and that of course a process that lasts more than nine months is going to have some problems. So it is with The Omen as well, though there is one anecdote that requires no participation by the Devil or anything supernatural to be bloodchilling.
A year after the release of The Omen, special effects artist John Richardson was driving through Belgium with his assistant Elizabeth Moore while they were working on A Bridge Too Far, the World War II film about Operation Market Gardens, a failed Allied effort to capture a number of Dutch bridges in late 1944. There was a grievous car accident, and as a result, Elizabeth Moore was decapitated. Richardson himself reported how the accident was uncannily similar to a decapitation effect he had taken part in during the shoot for the Omen, and reportedly the accident occurred near the town of Ommen.
1. The China Syndrome
This 1979 film starring Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, and Jack Lemmon centered around an attempt to smuggle footage out of a nuclear power plant showing that a nuclear meltdown had very narrowly been avoided was one of the big hits of its year. It was condemned by many in the nuclear energy industry as alarmist, and received a form of vindication that surely brought cold comfort to its makers when the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, a disaster which cost more than a billion dollars in clean up and which certain (heavily disputed) studies claim caused a 64% increase of some local cancer rates, occurred within 12 days of its premiere.
Unlike The Omen and The Exorcist, reportedly the studio did not try to cash in on real life tragedy, and the word from studio executives and stars like Michael Douglas was to tell any news outlet who asked “no comment.” Despite that, Michael Gray, who wrote the original script for The China Syndrome, accepted a job writing an article covering the Three Mile Island disaster for Rolling Stone Magazine, which became typical of the way other news outlets would try to spread the story of how The China Syndrome and Three Mile Island were comparable.
Dustin Koski also cowrote Return of the Living with Jonathan “Bogleech” Wojcik, a horror comedy about the first sighting of a living creature centuries after all Earth died and became ghosts.