Cursed Films

- We hear a lot about cursed films

around horror productions.

It's definitely a curious thing that people gravitate to.

You know, crazy things that happened

on the set of "The Exorcist"

or "The Omen".

You know, I remember watching "Poltergeist".

And I remember my parents telling me,

Oh, that little girl died.

And I was like, Oh my God.

Hello!

- I remember hearing the stories about "Poltergeist".

The lore was introduced to me long before the film was,

and so I almost felt like I had seen the movie

because I had heard about all of the kind of cursed things

that had happened on set.

- Most people when you hear of "Poltergeist" probably think,

oh yeah, that's that film that was kind of cursed.

And then you enter the internet into that and forget about it.

It's off and skyrocketing and it has a life of its own now.

It will never go away.

- There's a series of mishaps that happened

that believers will say,

uh, mean that there's a Poltergeist curse.

For example, on the set of the film, the little boy,

when he's being strangled by the toy clown,

the mechanism malfunctioned

and he claims he was actually being choked out.

Agh! Agh!

- One of the stories to come out of...

the original Poltergeist,

which you had a lot of tragic stories surrounding it

and a lot of deaths,

was JoBeth Williams in a...

muddy pool full of skeletons.

- If you need skeletons to come out of a muddy pool, what do you do?

Well, get some real ones, I guess.

- Some people think maybe the skeletons in the pool

at the end of the movie were actually real skeletons

from India.

The Poltergeist curse

is often attributed to these rumours

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.

I tend to believe that it is true

because those skeletons do look pretty good.

Ahh! Ahh!

- There are a number of crazy things that happened

throughout the making of the three Poltergeist films,

but there are two primary reasons

why people believe the films were cursed.

Now I lay me down to sleep...

The deaths of Heather O'Rourke

and Dominique Dunn.

Oh brother!

- Dominique Dunne was the daughter of Dominick Dunne,

who was a very famous writer for Vanity Fair.

But he made a name for himself

covering many of the famous murder trials

of the 1990s.

Her older brother was Griffin Dunne

who had made a number of movies.

Did you hear that?

- Dominique Dunne was in a relationship with John Sweeney,

who was the sous chef for Wolfgang Puck.

One evening, Dominique had been beaten up by John Sweeney

and so she...

broke off the relationship.

What's happening?

- Poltergeist had already been released

and was a big hit.

And John Sweeney showed up

at her house in Los Angeles,

and got into a fight with her

and began to strangle her.

He did not, at that time, kill her.

She then remained in a coma

for four or five days

and then she was taken off life support.

Dominick Dunne had the idea

to write about his daughter's murder

and the subsequent trial for Vanity Fair.

The judge ruled against the prosecution

in almost every way possible.

For example, John Sweeney had beaten up a girlfriend

previous to Dominique Dunne

and that was not allowed in court.

It looked as though John Sweeney,

under some kind of a plea bargain,

would get 10 years in prison.

That would have been better

because he ended up spending two and a half years in prison.

So, after Poltergeist,

Dominique Dunne is murdered by her boyfriend.

I think that doesn't pick up

a lot of cursed heat at the time,

but then, in "Poltergeist 2",

Will Sampson, an actor in the film,

who was also a Shaman,

was allowed onto set after hours to perform an exorcism

to try to rid the production of its demons.

- Two years after the release of "Poltergeist 2",

Will Sampson, that same actor who performed the exorcism,

died of kidney failure and malnutrition at age 53.

Okay, that one, he's young; that could be a curse.

And then to add to this list,

Julian Beck, who played the cult leader,

the old scary man that they used

in a lot of the marketing for the film -

even if you haven't seen the film

you're probably aware of this guy. Ahhhhhhh!

You are gonna dieeeeeeeee!

- He died of stomach cancer as well.

Sorry to see...

you're still unconvinced.

- When I accepted to do "Poltergeist 3",

I was aware of the fact that there had been deaths

on the previous two films.

I think the only thing that brought about

any feelings of a curse or anything

was we had to recreate one of the characters in the film

because the actor Julian Beck had died

and we wanted to bring back the character of Rev. Kane.

So they used a death mask of um...

Julian Beck,

to make the prosthetics for Nate Davis

so that Nate would look like Julian.

They called it a death mask.

Whether the casting was done while Julian was alive

or after he died, I'm not sure.

It was a little creepy.

I'm Matthew Hutson.

I'm a science writer and I'm the author

of "The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking:

How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy and Sane."

Magical Thinking is basically belief in the supernatural.

Things like luck, destiny, mind over matter,

life after death

or the belief that objects carry essences.

This is the law of contagion.

It's the idea that mental properties like personality

or good and evil can be transmitted through contact.

So, a great example of this is the story of the Red Sox jersey

buried under Yankee Stadium.

Following a lengthy curse

that hung over his beloved Red Sox baseball team,

a Boston fan hatched his own devious plot:

bury a Red Sox jersey in the foundation

of the new Yankee Stadium.

- He went to the construction site for Yankee Stadium

and brought with him a jersey for David Ortiz

who was a star on the Red Sox.

And he put this jersey in the wet cement,

thinking that he would curse the stadium.

And the next year the Yankees found out about it.

And, so, people were calling for this thing to be removed

and they had to jackhammer it out of two feet of concrete.

- They ripped the concrete apart today

at the new Yankee Stadium,

and there it was, wedged in there.

Yup, that's it, the infamous Red Sox jersey

buried by a construction worker.

- They pulled this jersey out of the cement

and held it up under the flashing bulbs.

It was like a magical rite, like a cleansing ceremony.

It felt very tribal.

- We infuse inanimate objects with agency,

and our brains are just really good at that.

We know from research by cognitive psychologists

that if you offer subjects the opportunity

to wear Hitler's jacket,

they don't wanna do it.

There's evil in the object itself.

Almost as if the evil is floating in the ether

and it just infuses into a body, a person,

a jacket, an article.

Anything associated with a horror film -

the house, the set, a prop -

of course, it's gonna have that kind of sense

like there's something evil lurking within -

in the walls or in the object.

There's something therapeutic

about owning the things that frightened you.

I just am a fan of the art.

You know, some people collect paintings.

I collect props.

So this is my toy slash prop room.

This is years and years of collecting right here...

and a few bucks as well.

A lot of screen-used masks,

various Halloween films.

It's very important for me to have screen-used stuff

versus just replicas.

The screen-used stuff, I mean it's so rare

and you're like one of a small portion of people

that may have one.

They only did one of these Frankenstein masks