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Haunted Or Cursed Films?

Gary Oldman starred in "Sid and Nancy" as Sid Vicious, and also appeared with Kevin Bacon in..... JFK.
AAARGH! :gaga:
 
Did It In Two

Excellent playing!

And, more to the thread's topic, I find it interesting, given the intense hatred engendered among the right wingers and guilty minds by Stone's movie JFK, is it not remarkable that those associated with it were not cursed somehow, or blacklisted, or otherwise part of what we might be calling a haunted film?

Then again...maybe they were.
 
I just went back to the beginning of the thread and noticed Mr. R.I.N.G. included a mention of an actor in "Once Upon a Time in the West". Hadn't heard this before, and indeed the IMDB provides the following info on an actor called Al Mulock, who plays one of the three gunman at the beginning of the movie.
He committed suicide on the set of his last movie _C'era una volta il West_ (1968) (qv) by jumping from a hotel, on location in Guadix, Spain. One of the film's screenwriters Mickey Knox and production manager Claudio Mancini were in a hotel room when they saw his body pass their window. Mancini put Mulock in his car to drive him to the hospital. Knox claimed in an interview that before that, director Sergio Leone said to Mancini "get the costume, we need the costume". Mulock was wearing the costume he wore in the movie when he jumped.
Though I consider OUATITW as a haunting movie rather than a haunted one.
 
I note that no-one's suggested Rebel Without A Cause yet: given the "tragic" circumstances that surrounded the deaths of each of the leads (James Dean -car wreck; Sal Mineo -murdered; Natalie Wood -drowned) it would appear to qualify as a cursed movie, even without the story (UL or confirmed? I seem to recall hearing Dennis Hopper referring to such an accident in an interview.) of the stunt-driver who allegedly died during the filming of the chicken-run sequence.
 
Rebel Without A Clue

Yes, that would qualify as one, it seems. One suspects it's simply that their deaths happened after a reasonable interval, otherwise we'd certainly see REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE as cursed.

For fun trivia, check this, which makes no mention of the chicken sequence having caused a stunt driver's death.

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0048545/trivia
 
As I said, I'm pretty sure I heard Hopper say something about an accident during the shoot in a relatively recent interview (maybe on TCM -IIRC same prog. mentioned the chainmail thing mentioned in your link, and that was the first time I'd heard about that). However, it's also possible I'm conflating a Hopper anecdote about something that happened on Rebel... with an anecdote about something that happened on some other movie he was in. It's also possible -given his long twilight period of drink and drugs- that it was Hopper doing the conflating, so a massively unreliable reference either way. Sorry I brought it up now. :)
 
Hop on Pop

We should hunt down said interview and see, n'est pas? Can you recall the source of this interview? Was it print, telly, or eavesdropping?
 
This is a really old movie..but in a film called A Night of Mystery (1937)...the lead actress Helen Burgess died of pnemonia(sp?)near the end of shooting..she was only 20yrs. old...they finished the movie by using a double .....it shows up on classic movie channels once in a while...dont know about haunted..but kind of spooky watching an actress right before her untimely death..
 
Interesting bit there about A Night of Mystery... in a similar vein, have you ever heard of the fake Shemps in Three Stooges movies? When Shemp Howard died, there were a number of Three Stooges shorts in various stages of completion... rather than throw away Shemp's last performances, the remaining crew hired various people to dress like Shemp and finish out the film for him, sometimes only for a few shots and sometimes longer.

Thus Fake Shemps were born. Years later, stooge fan Sam Raimi began to use "fake Shemp" as a term to describe people who helped on the set doubling for somebody else.
 
Film-making, especially with stunts and action films, is bound to be high-risk and involve high fatality rate. If you consider the number of people involved in one film, including actors and technicians, it would be astounding for there to be no accidents, illnesses or deaths. It also depends on the time "limit" on the "curse". There are quite a few horror/ghost movies which use the "cursed film" myth to promote the product, especially if they are touted as "based on fact" - true or not - but some statistical coincidences in a single film is worthy of study.

This is one of the explanations for the curse of Tutankhamun - "Ooooh! Every member of the Carter team died after the discovery!" Yeah? Take a hazardous and time-consuming profession in a country where disease and parasites were common during a time when medical science wasn't the level it is today ... what d'you expect? And how long did it take for the last member of the team to die in mysterious circumstances! :rolleyes:
 
Aren't The Crow series of films cursed in some way? Brandon Lee died on the set of the first film, and I read somewhere about stuntmen dying on the sets of the sequels and the TV series. I can't seem to find anything about that at the moment but I distinctly remember reading about them.
 
Stormkhan said:
This is one of the explanations for the curse of Tutankhamun - "Ooooh! Every member of the Carter team died after the discovery!" Yeah? Take a hazardous and time-consuming profession in a country where disease and parasites were common during a time when medical science wasn't the level it is today ... what d'you expect? And how long did it take for the last member of the team to die in mysterious circumstances! :rolleyes:


The fact that Carter lived to a ripe old age always did kinda kick that curse theory in the teeth..Always fun in books discussing the curse the lengths that writers would go to explain the fact that the first one in the chamber did'nt seem to be affected by the "curse" in the slightest..
 
Perhaps the Ancient Egyptians have demonstrated once again their sentience and advanced culture. Ladies and germs ...

"Smart" Curses!
Set only to activate against a certain type of tomb-robber but not against "truly" professional and caring egyptologists!
 
I'm with you on this one, Stormkhan. I've read quite a bit about Bruce & Brandon Lee and SO wanted to believe there was something sinister behind it all but nothing I've come across has convinced me. In fact the most plausible argument I've come across is the whole 'making movies is a dangerous business where people take crazy risks, and involve a couple of hundred people so something odd is bound to happen at some stage'.

However, on my VHS edition of 'The Crow' (which is an awesome movie by the way) there is a very portentious interview with Brandon Lee conducted just before his death in which, with hindsight obviously, he seems to be making peace with everything. Doesn't bear up if you consider he was about to get married and had everything to look forward to etc. Geez, he was a gorgeous guy... sigh!

I have to say though - that bit in '3 men..' gave me a bit of a start when I saw it!! Didn't look like Ted Danson to me, either.
 
Tongs

I thought it was fairly well proven that the Lees, per et fils, ran afoul of the Hong Kong tongs when they broke free of them to make Hollywood movies stateside.
 
Re: Rocky and The Evil Dead

XGUY said:
And at the beggining of the first Evil Dead movie you can see a man walking beside the bridge just before it nearly callapses under the weight of the car on the way to the remote cabin. There was not supposed to be anyone there! A crew member perhaps???

All is revealed in the DVD commentary - your mysterious figure is none other than executive producer Rob Tapert.
 
I know this is an old thread, so please pardon me for doing this but I have to clear it.

Poltergeist curse:.:eek!!!!:

Julian Sands: long-term illness, died shortly after the movie he was in.

Will Sampson: long-term illness, died shortly after the movie he was in.

Heather O'Rourke: undiagnosed long-term illness, died shortly after the movie she was in.

Dominique Donne: strangled by her boyfriend.

That's it. That's the curse. Three people with mostly identifiable illnesses and one who was murdered.

All the rest of the cast, btw, is doing just fine.
 
ceinwyn said:
Poltergeist curse:.:eek!!!!:

Julian Sands: long-term illness, died shortly after the movie he was in.

Julian Sands? Still alive and not in any of the Poltergeist films. Did you mean Julian Beck, who was Kane in Poltergeist II?

Sorry for the pedantry, but this is how rumours and urban legends start! :D
 
Sands of Time

I was going to say, for a dead fellow, Sands did good work in MERCY and subsequent films. lol

As for any "curse" -- those tend to be more clusters of coincidental deaths that any insurance actuary could tell you are fairly common, based on the same basic effect as having at least two people with the same birthday in any random group of ten or so.
 
Delbert said:
Julian Sands? Still alive and not in any of the Poltergeist films. Did you mean Julian Beck, who was Kane in Poltergeist II?

Sorry for the pedantry, but this is how rumours and urban legends start! :D
Ack! I've made a mistake! Don't tell anyone!.:eek:

Yeah, I meant Julian Beck. Thanks for catching that, Delbert.
 
Julian Sands was wonderful in Warlock with Richard E. Grant. Just a passing comment ...

Take a big-budget movie (or even a mid-budget movie) and count how many people, cast and crew, work on it. Then take a set period of time - say, five years - then do a poll of the cast/crew and see how many have died, suffered serious illness or misfortune. I think we'd be surprised at the number of "spooky coincidences". It would be great to get a long-term grant to make such a study for statistical and sociological purposes.
We could start with, for example, Pirates of The Carribean or The Passion of Christ .. both simply gagging for "curse" urban legends!
 
Side Issue

The actuarial chart answer to why some films seem or are said to be cursed does not answer, though, the question of why such legends about them arise in the first place.

It's been fairly well proven that King Tut's Tomb's curse was cobbled by reporters to sell papers. Worked, too.

I'd be surprised if some of Hollywood's legends of cursed movies didn't come straight from the Public Relations office, intending to start a whisper campaign and drum up repeat interest or cult status.

Now, if it's true that a given group of people will experience X number of deaths on the average per year, et cetera, then how come ALL films are not considered cursed?

What is it that makes those stories so appealing, and what coalesces them on only a few films?
 
There is something in our psyche that enjoys being scared. Thus, we like to imagine curses happening to other people and, by watching the so-called cursed film, we are almost participating in a group experience.

Either that or we just enjoy crap happening to other people from a supernatural source. Or is that the same but in less scientific language?

The marketing hype enjoys a good curse rumour, regardless of taste, decency or accuracy.
 
But Why

But why one film over any other film? Is there something about the film? Is it due to a cluster of deaths being associated with it? Is it a kind of critical mass reached in a given audience?

POLTERGEIST is a famous example of a cursed film. Its subject matter lends itself to this sort of thinking.

THE WIZARD OF OZ is another example, and its subject matter is whimsy and irony. (There's not place like WHERE?) So it doesn't lend itself to haunted rumors, yet they exist.

Has anyone here read the novel Flicker by Theodore Rozak? It's a novel about movies, and cursed movies, and lost movies, and so on. You'd enjoy it immensely if you like this thread.
 
Hate to rake over old ground but Ogo I'm sure I've seen the helicopter in the Twilight Zone. I recall it hovers over the water that Morrow is hiding in, firing. I'm so sure I've seen it as I remember reading about Morrows death and watched the scene quite closely, disturbed that Landis would still include it.

I also recall an interview (Premiere I think) about the whole event where in Landis said (and I'm not making a direct quote here) something along the lines that "Morrow died making a great movie". Which it most certainly wasn't. There was also many issues with the children being on set that night as Landis and his crew were in breach of child labour laws. Landis did go into sitcom land for a while but he's back directing movies.

But then again as we saw at last years Oscars when Polanski got an Oscar for The Piano, all you have to do is make a good movie and Hollywood will forgive your for everything...underage rape...murder...

Can't believe no one has mentioned the amorphous blob that appears in The Railway Children. So I'll mention it and dismiss it. It's near the end, in the background, and though on intial viewing it does look like something flopping over a dry stone wall, it is infact a branch (obviously very dodgy Art Direction) falling from a tree.

And of course there is the UFO (plane) that passes behind Tim Robbins head in Arlington Road. (It's the scene in Robbins backyard, when they're barbequeing...barbaqueing...cooking meat)

mooks out

PS It's an intriguing way to market your film though!
 
High Horse

Oh now let's not get on our high horse. If doing reprehensible things disqualifies the art someone makes, then almost all art would be tossed.

There is no connection between art and artist as far as moral, ethical, or spiritual qualities. The scummiest slime can produce sacred art and the highest-minded saint can produce the shittiest of pornography.

Truly.
 
As a filmmaker myself, Frater I agree. I've seen the Bodyworks exhibition, watched the Autopsy on 4 and enjoyed some Death Row art.

My point was that in pursuit of the big bucks Hollywood will forgive you, and lets be frank...Hollywood may talk of film as being "art" but I'd argue a fair percent of the populace of Hollywood see films as dollar makers rather than as art. (Sure would explain some of the dross I've seen recently from the West Coast) And as someone wiser than me said...

"Get the actors and musicians and everyone else will follow."
George Jung

Hey, if Hollywood can forgive them for their misdemeanours then we can all forgive them.

mooks
 
Context

It's a context problem. Just as being a philanderer and adulterer in no way affected Clinton's ability to be a good President; just as being a philanderer and adulterer in no wa impedes Koby Bryant's abillity to play basketball; just as being in prison didn't prevent Cervantes or O. Henry from writing well; so being a reprehensible pedophile doesn't affect Roman Polanski's ability to make films.

However, this doesn't mean he should be forgiven his crimes. They exist in a distinctly separate context. One is art, the other life.

It's up to the law to punish crimes. It's up to the audience to punish bad art by not patronizing it.

Is cinema an art? If so, it's a collaborative art form more akin to architecture or other group endeavor. I believe the results can be artistic, and often display artistry, but very rare is the movie where all aspects worked so well that the final result might be considered art. CITIZEN KANE comes to mind; everything worked flawlessly to produce a collective effort that remains fresh and remarkable no matter how it's analyzed.
 
According to the DVD of James Bond Licence to Kill, the area where they filmed the tanker scenes was cursed and they actually show one of the photos taken during the filming of one of the explosions and you can actually see what looks like a hand of fire reaching out from it.

Really spooky.
 
Who?

Who cursed the area? And why? Is it a lagoon or something, or in the open sea?
 
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