From Creepy Coincidences To Eerily Similar Deaths — 11 Terrifying Things That Happened During Or After The Filming Of These Iconic Horror Movies
By Carley Suthers,
4 hours ago
Horror films have been terrifying moviegoers for over a century now. Nothing is quite as eerie as watching something spooky in a dark theater — whether it's demon-possessed children or sinister creatures from beyond. However, some horror movies were just as (if not more) terrifying offscreen as they were onscreen...
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Sometimes, a film set — or even the cast — seems "cursed." From unexplained natural events such as fires and strange gusts of wind to tragic occurrences such as unexpected deaths and fatal accidents, making a horror movie is not to be taken lightly. Without further ado, here are 11 classic horror movies that had strangely sinister events occur during or after production:
Note: This post contains mentions of domestic violence, murder, firearms, illness, and suicide.
1. Psycho (1960):
The infamous shower in Psycho quickly became one of the most recognizable movie scenes ever. However, according to author Robert Graysmith — one fan might have taken his obsession with the film to a heinous extreme .
When the film hit theaters in 1960, it revolutionized how movies were shown, and the shower scene was the equivalent of Drew Barrymore being killed off at the beginning of Scream — as no one was expecting superstar Janet Leigh to be murdered in the movie. In her first interview after the film's release, Leigh stated , "I believed that knife went into me. It was that real, that horrifying. I could feel it!" She and Hitchcock also claimed that it was, indeed, her body being shown in the scene.
Graysmith revealed, "Janet Leigh went around telling everyone how embarrassed she was filming the shower scene, and Hitchcock backed up the story. They concocted a lie." However, the body in the shower actually belonged to Marli Renfro — a stripper and one of the first Playboy bunnies, whose only other film work was in Tonight for Sure , a 1962 Francis Ford Coppola movie. And this is where the body double confusion began...
Cut to 2001, Kenneth Dean Hunt — a handyman — was convicted of "killing two women, including an actress who was a body double for Janet Leigh in the film Psycho ." The body double in question, Myra Davis — was simply a stand-in to test lighting angles — not to appear in nude scenes. The press quickly reported that "Myra Davis" was the nude body double, Marli Renfro's true identity.
However, Graysmith wasn't content with the media's narrative and began investigating the story even further. In December 2007, Davis's granddaughter, Sherry, admitted her confusion regarding her grandmother's supposed shower scene. "My grandmother would never have done any nude work," she claimed.
Graysmith's solo investigation later revealed that Myra Davis and Marli Renfro were, in fact, two entirely separate people. And Renfro — Leigh's actual nude body double — was still alive.
In the book The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock's Shower , Graysmith suggested that Kenneth Dean Hunt was a Psycho fanatic who set out to kill Leigh's body double — without realizing he murdered the stand-in by mistake. "Everyone confused them," Graysmith explained, "even a murderer. I discovered Marli was still alive. It turns out she's been so busy fishing in Utah, hiking in Alaska, swimming with dolphins in Florida and generally living life to the full that she had no idea she was meant to be dead."
2. The Amityville Horror (2005):
Although not filmed at the real-life Amityville Horror home, the 2005 remake had some spine-tingling stories of its own. While the 1979 original was shot in New Jersey, the remake's “home” set was a modified 19th-century house in Salem, Wisconsin. While doing press for the film, star Ryan Reynolds — who portrayed George Lutz — told MovieWeb, "They found this house that they sort of retrofitted. It's terrifying. You walk up and it's just upsetting. There's something about the house that's upsetting. There's something about the colors around it, everything was just a little upsetting."
However, that was only the beginning of the upsetting events that occurred while the movie was being made. Shortly after filming began, a corpse washed up on the shore of a lake near the set. During an interview with RadioFree, Reynolds opened up about the terrifying discovery, “Yes, that was something that was awful that happened. I know nothing about it, and we certainly didn't treat the situation cavalierly. But this was a densely populated lake area as well. I mean, it wasn't like a secluded pond, and this mafia member floated up or something. A legitimate accident, I think.”
Another bizarre occurrence in the early hours was that many members of the cast and crew would find themselves jolted awake. "I think a lot of people make that stuff up to sell their movie, but there was some weird stuff that happened. A lot of the crew were waking up at 3:15 in the morning which was when all these atrocities in the house took place each time. I think it was a subconscious thing. You read the script and suddenly pop awake at 3:15 in the morning," Reynolds admitted .
During an Annabelle after-party at the Emerson Theater, director John R. Leonetti opened up to the Hollywood Reporter about two of the many creepy coincidences that happened on the set of The Conjuring prequel.
“The first [incident] was when we were prepping. We went into the apartment where we were shooting, and in the transient window above the living room window. It was a full moon, and there were three fingers drawn through the dust along the window, and our demon has three fingers and three talons. [The markings] were being backlit by the moon. I have a picture! It was sick.”
The film’s producer, Peter Safran, backed up Leonetti’s demon claim and revealed a little more about the "much worse" supernatural incident that occurred next, “We shot in this amazing, old apartment building near Koreatown and we had some funky stuff go down. In particular, the first day that the demon was shooting in full makeup, we brought the demon up in the elevator. He walks out and walks around to the green room to where we’re holding the talent, and just as he walks under — a giant glass light fixture is being followed by the actor playing the handyman of the building — and all of a sudden the entire glass light fixture falls down on his head, the janitor‘s head. And in the script the demon kills the janitor in that hallway. It was totally freaky.”
Although Leonetti later added that he had not yet seen the actual Annabelle doll (who is "housed" at the Warren's Occult Museum) in person, he revealed that a horror-movie-esque fate awaited a friend who viewed it, “It could really f—ing scare people. Actually one guy I knew died after he saw it, crazy shit.”
Vera Farmiga — who played the role of real-life paranormal investigator Lorraine Warren in The Conjuring — began having unexplainable experiences as soon as she became interested in the script. She revealed the first incident occurred after a phone call with director James Wan, "The strangest occurrence for me personally, on the first one, was the day I had a creative conversation with James Wan. I had just been researching Lorraine. I wasn’t familiar with her, and so before our phone call, I was on the computer, and I had closed it. We had our conversation. At that point I was just smitten with James. I said, ‘If Patrick Wilson is in…' - because I knew at the time he had also been offered a role – ‘…then I’m in.’ I just wanted to be sure that Patrick was going to be my partner. So we agreed, and then we said goodbye, and I opened the computer screen and there were three digital claw marks, from the upper right diagonal to the lower left."
The actor also recalled feeling she could not take the spooky script home with her, "I read it in fits and spurts, because it brought on overwhelming feelings: terror, awe, shock. I didn't ever want to read the script at home. I figured the safest thing for me would be to read it somewhere else during the day."
Even though Farmiga refused to take her work home with her, it seems some part of the work decided to attach itself anyway. Telling CinemaBlend that when she returned home on the final day of filming, she discovered "three claw mark bruises across [her] thigh." — somewhat similar to the ones on her laptop screen. "It wasn’t incredibly painful." She continued, "It might have felt like a bruise… It was these three, very distinct, what looks like claw marks, that long nails or long fingertips, like thin fingertips could make. But it didn’t hurt and I texted to James and I can’t even remember his response."
The Possession — inspired by a now-debunked hoax involving an antique wine cabinet purchased on eBay— had a few unscripted experiences that were anything but fake. Shortly before the film's release in 2012, star Jeffrey Dean Morgan opened up to the Hollywood Reporter about his initial skepticism surrounding the box and its relation to bizarre onset events, “I’m very skeptical, but not only would I not want the box around and to tempt fate, but there were enough weird things going on around our set that I’ve never seen happen on sets before.”
A few of the eerie details he recalled were lights exploding in the middle of a take and strange cold gusts of wind blowing in on the movie's closed set, “It [Wind gusts] always happened in the middle of doing key scenes. It didn’t happen in between takes or doing scenes that didn’t have a big story impact.”
However, while the "real" dybbuk box may have been proven to be fake, the prop box had a strange story of its own. Morgan revealed what happened after the shoot wrapped: “We had all of our props a couple days after we finished wrapping — they put everything in storage for if you’re gonna do reshoots or anything. It burnt to the ground. It was investigated, and there were no signs of arson, no electrical fire.”
The imitation dybbuk box used during filming was one of the most notable pieces destroyed in the fire.
Although it was a horror movie, the most horrific part of the cult 1960s TV series' big screen adaptation happened while filming.
On the night of July 23, 1982, in Santa Clarita, California, one of the lead actors, Vic Morrow — best known for his starring role in the ABC series Combat! — was filming a scene alongside 7-year-old Myca Dinh Le and 6-year-old Renee Shin-Yi Chen. Morrow was playing Bill Connor, a racist who was transported through time and became a Vietnamese man attempting to save two children — played by Le and Chen — from US troops during the Vietnam War.
The scene, which was filmed at night — and therefore a direct violation of child labor laws in the first place — called for Morrow's character to carry his two children out of an abandoned village and flee across a river. At the same time, American soldiers were supposed to be "chasing" them in a hovering helicopter. An actual Vietnam veteran, Dorcey Wingo, was piloting the helicopter during the scene.
While hovering close to a large explosive effect, Wingo positioned the aircraft close to the ground and then turned it 180 degrees for the following shot. The special effect was detonated while the helicopter's tail rotor was flying directly above it, and a metal lid from the explosion struck the rotor, causing the aircraft to spin out of control. At the ensuing trial, the defense claimed the special effect had been detonated prematurely.
The three actors on the ground could not escape the plummeting aircraft or its blades and were killed instantly. Chen was crushed to death by the right landing skid, and the helicopter's still-spinning blades decapitated both Morrow and Le. The New York Times reported that the helicopter sequence was both "poorly planned" and "badly rehearsed." Between 1986 and 1987, an investigation was conducted surrounding the events of the ill-fated scene, and five members of the crew — including Dorcey Wingo — were tried for manslaughter and later acquitted .
The strangest part of the entire situation? Nine years earlier, in 1973, Morrow insisted on having a life insurance policy while filming any scenes in which he had to ride in a helicopter. When asked why he was so hesitant towards this type of scene, it was reported that Morrow replied , "I have always had a premonition I was going to die in a helicopter crash!"
7. The Omen:
Although many strange and heartbreaking events plagued the cast and crew of The Omen (including star Gregory Peck's son committing suicide, a plane crash, one producer who narrowly avoided being struck by lightning, and the death of a baboon handler) — one year after shooting the film, a tragedy occurred that oddly mimicked a death shown in the movie itself.
On August 13, 1976 (which happened to be a Friday the 13th), the film's special effects consultant John Richardson and his assistant Liz Moore took a late-night drive in Holland — where Richardson was working on Richard Attenborough's World War II drama, A Bridge Too Far . The pair was involved in a head-on collision. Richardson somehow managed to survive the crash, while Moore did not. She was decapitated in the wreck in an eerily similar manner to one of the film's characters, Keith Jennings' — who was decapitated by a sheet of glass in the movie.
Shortly after the crash, Richardson reportedly noticed a road sign that must have chilled him to his very core. The unassuming sign pointed to a small nearby Dutch village and listed the distance from Richardson's crash site.
Where exactly was this bone-chilling sign directing drivers?
A town called Ommen, which was exactly 6.66 km away from the fatal accident.
Many unsettling events occurred after the filming of the iconic horror novel adaptation Rosemary's Baby, leading many to believe that the movie and its filming locations were "cursed..."
One such incident was producer William Castle's strange hospitalization in April 1969. Since the film's release the previous summer, Castle had been receiving much hate mail due to the film's satanic themes. One cryptic anonymous letter read , "Bastard. Believer of Witchcraft. Worshipper at the Shrine of Satanism. My prediction is you will slowly rot during a long and painful illness which you have brought upon yourself." A few months later, Castle was hospitalized with kidney failure, where, in a delirium, he insisted that the film was "cursed" and repeatedly shouted, "Rosemary, for God's sake, drop that knife." The 54-year-old barely recovered and never worked on another box office hit for the rest of his life.
Another death attributed to the curse was that of the film's composer, Krzysztof Komeda, who fell off a rocky slope while roughhousing with a friend at a party in the fall of 1968. He slipped into a coma and died several months later due to a brain hematoma. While at first, that may sound like an unconnected incident — this tragic passing mimicked a death in the film when Hutch, Rosemary's suspicious friend, dies after being in a coma.
In 1980, 12 years after the film's release, acclaimed singer-songwriter John Lennon was shot and killed by a "fan" outside of The Dakota — the building that served as the Bramford (aka Rosemary's apartment). Many have linked the film's "curse" to Lennon's assassination.
William Castle Productions Courtesy Everett Collection
9. The Exorcist :
The Exorcist was yet another horror movie set that generally seemed " cursed ." From tragic deaths to the serious injuries Ellen Burstyn acquired during filming, it appeared as though the production itself was possessed. However, one of the more bizarre events surrounding the film was the fire on set...
At an event for the film's 45th anniversary, director William Friedkin recalled , "I do remember one morning getting a phone call at 4:00 a.m. from the production manager, who said don't bother to come into work today and I said, 'Why? Am I fired?' He said, 'No, but the set has just burned to the ground.'"
Friedkin continued to note the odd circumstances surrounding the fire, particularly that it occurred during the production days when they were shooting the actual exorcism scene. Another reason the fire was unexplainable was the fact that the "MacNeil home" was a refrigerated set.
"We had three large refrigeration units that would refrigerate the entire Peninsula Hotel." The director explained, "They were so powerful, so that when we would come in in the morning, the set would be about 30 degrees below zero every morning."
Oddly enough, the only set room that wasn't destroyed was Regan's bedroom — where most of the film's horrific scenes occurred. "That's the only thing that happened during the entire film that I thought was some kind of bad karma," he confessed.
After the six-week production delay due to the fire, Thomas M. King — a real-life Jesuit priest — was brought in to bless the cursed set.
The Crow — now a cult classic with a horrific backstory — was supposed to launch Brandon Lee into superstardom. However, a tragic mix up near the end of production caused Lee to suffer an eerily similar fate to one of his iconic father's film characters.
On March 31, 1993, Lee and costar Michael Massee were filming a scene where Massee's character, Funboy, fires a revolver at Lee's character, Eric, as he walks into the room. The fatal scene called for Lee to be "shot" from 12-15 feet away, and the revolver was supposed to be loaded with blank cartridges so there would be no fear of live projectiles flying around the set. However, the revolver's barrel was not inspected for obstructions before being handed to Massee for the scene.
Unbeknownst to Massee, there was a bullet from the dummy round trapped in the barrel, which caused the blank cartridge to fire with the same force as a live round. The forceful blank struck Lee directly in the abdomen, and he was rushed to the hospital, where he died hours later due to internal injuries.
Another odd twist to the tragic tale? Brandon's father, Bruce Lee, died in 1973 shortly after starring in a film titled "Game of Death." In the movie, the martial artist played an actor who was shot after gangsters replaced a fake bullet with a live one.
One of the most "cursed" movie sets in history has to be the Poltergeist film series.
Many believe that the so-called curse resulted from the special effects team using real human skeletons — due to the lower price tag — for the "flooded pool" scene. However, while filming, the cast was unaware that the props department had taken such drastic measures to cut costs. JoBeth Williams — who played the matriarch of the Freeling family — later revealed to Vanity Fair, “I always assumed that the skeletons were made by the prop department. A few years later, I ran into one of the special effects guys, and I said, ‘You guys making all those skeletons, that must have been really amazing.’ He said, ‘Oh, we didn’t make them, those were real.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yeah, they were real skeletons.’ I don’t know where they were bought from, but that really grossed me out,” she says. “I’m glad I didn’t know that then, because I would’ve really been screaming a lot — for real.”
However, the rumors surrounding a curse didn't begin until four cast members suddenly died during or shortly after each film's production wrapped:
The first tragedy befell Dominique Dunne, who played older sister Dana Freeling. After a physical altercation in September 1982 — three months after Poltergeist was released — Dunne broke up with boyfriend John Sweeney, whom she had been dating for a year. One month later, on October 30, 1982, Sweeney returned to the actor's home to allegedly "reconcile." However, Sweeney, who had a history of physical violence, escalated his behavior and a fight quickly ensued between the exes. In a fit of rage, he strangled Dunne. She was then transported to the hospital, where she died five days later.
The following year, another cast tragedy occurred when Julian Beck — who played Kane, the evil preacher in Poltergeist II — was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Beck died shortly after finishing his work on the sequel.
Will Sampson — who played Taylor, the Native American shaman — suffered from scleroderma and died due to post-operative kidney failure after a heart and lung transplant one year after the sequel was released.
The final death in this heartbreaking quartet was that of Heather O'Rourke, who played Carol Anne Freeling — the central focus of the entire film franchise. In 1987, O'Rourke was misdiagnosed with Crohn's disease after contracting giardiasis from her family's well water. The young actor was prescribed cortisone injections, which made her self-conscious about her puffy cheeks while filming Poltergeist III . On January 31, 1988 — five months after filming ended — O'Rourke became very ill. However, her sickness was simply attributed to the flu until the following day, when she collapsed and experienced cardiac arrest en route to the hospital. Doctors were able to restart her heart once, but after suffering cardiac arrest for a second time, O'Rourke passed away . It was discovered that instead of Crohn's, the 12-year-old suffered from congenital stenosis of the intestine, which was compounded by septic shock. Daniel Hollander, who was the head of gastroenterology at Irvine Medical Center, explained that the actor's death was "distinctly unusual" because she lacked any previous symptoms of a congenital bowel problem.
Which one of these cursed horror movie stories shocked you the most? Do you know of any other spooky or sinister events that occurred during a horror movie's production? Let us know in the comments!
If you or someone you know is in immediate danger as a result of domestic violence, call 911. For anonymous, confidential help, you can call the 24/7 National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or chat with an advocate via the website.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-800-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
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Sharon L Bodine Elilah Agape
35m ago
Thank you🙏🙏🙏🙏actors, actresses, background actors, entire production teams, gaffers & crafty providers for providing theatrical education & theatrical entertainment for us💙❤️🙏Thank you for all you do. You're appreciated more than words can express
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