Table of contents:
These films are known all over the world not only for their artistic value - the films have also become overgrown with speculation and legends about the deadly curses imposed on film crews.
Poltergeist
1982
The curse of the Poltergeist trilogy is the most famous in Hollywood. It is said that the real human skeletons used during filming brought the crew into trouble. However, "troubles" - to put it mildly. Actress Dominic Dunn, who played the eldest daughter in the Freeling family, was strangled by her boyfriend after the release of the first part of the trilogy. Actor Julian Beck from the second part of "Poltergeist" died immediately after filming ended due to cancer. Following the death of actor Will Sampson during heart surgery. The fourth death in the cast shocked Hollywood the most: during the filming of the third "Poltergeist", 12-year-old Heather O'Rourke, the performer of Carol Ann's youngest daughter, died in all three parts of the cycle. The girl died from a heart attack caused by an intestinal disease. It was not only the actors who were affected by the curse. The writer James Kahn, who adapted the film's script for the novel, fell victim to the elements. As Kahn himself said, when he wrote the line “Lightning tore the night sky”, lightning really hit his house, from which the air conditioner was ripped off and the writer was wounded. He spent several months in the hospital. The final chord in a series of tragic events was the destruction of the real house of the "Freeling family", where the shooting took place, during the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake.
Crow
1994
Mystics associate the curse of the film with the ancestral curse of the Lee family. Martial arts master and actor Bruce Lee died at 33 after taking a pill for a headache that caused cerebral edema. The circumstances of the artist's death have not been fully clarified: according to one source, the pill contained an incompatible dose of aspirin and meprobamate, but there were also versions that the death was faked by Bruce's envious people. The death of his son on the set of "The Crow" on March 31, 1993 can be called a coincidence. In the final episode, the character of Brandon Lee was to be killed by his enemy Fanboy, played by Michael Massy. By a fatal accident, the pistol from which Michael was shooting at Brandon hit the plug, which, when fired with a blank cartridge, fatally wounded the actor in the stomach. Prior to this, filming of "The Crow" was accompanied by setbacks: the film's personnel were injured, the equipment was destroyed by a hurricane. After Lee Jr.'s death, superstitious members of the group said that this was how death sought Brandon.
Rosemary's Baby
1968
A year after the release of this horror film, director Roman Polanski experienced a tragedy that no sophisticated Hollywood screenwriter could have imagined. 26-year-old actress and model Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, was stabbed to death by members of the sect of maniac Charles Manson in the last month of pregnancy. Manson and seven members of his sect, who participated in other ritual murders, were sentenced to life. Polanski, who at first talked to reporters about the murder of his pregnant wife, later left America for several years. 11 years later, in the arch of the Dakota house in New York, where the shooting of "Rosemary's Baby" took place, the mad Beatles fan Mark Chapman shot John Lennon.
The exorcist
1973
The popular American weekly Entertainment Weekly named "The Exorcist" the most terrifying film in the history of cinema. But horror is caused not only by the plot and special effects, but also by the tragedies associated with the film's team and even its audience! Even the Soviet Pravda, citing a Western source, wrote about the film's influence on fans of intense cinema: “Chicago psychiatrist Louis Schlan says that after this film was shown in the city, he had more patients. Two young men who saw the picture had to be sent to a psychiatric hospital. Four patients discovered the devil in themselves, two in their children. In Boston, people call the Catholic center every day asking them to expel the evil spirits from them. " During the filming process, the exorcist also asked for the help of the exorcist: it seemed to the team that, because of the demons, dark things were constantly happening on the set. Later, tragedy befell the family of actress Mercedes McCambridge, who voiced the demon Pazuzu in the body of the main character. In 1987, her son killed his child and wife and committed suicide.
Stalker
1979
The story of the drama "Stalker", based on the story of the Strugatsky brothers "Roadside Picnic", is full of setbacks that the film crew faced. It all started even before the start of work: on January 31, 1977, the city of Isfara in Tajikistan, which director Andrei Tarkovsky had selected for filming, was destroyed by an earthquake. When a new nature was found and the film was put into production, the team was let down by the film: the first materials turned out to be a marriage, filming was suspended. It's hard to believe, but after filming ended, the problem with the film re-emerged. This time the duplicates were not just spoiled - almost all of the material died in the Mosfilm laboratory! No one hoped for the restoration of the project, but Tarkovsky managed to secure re-financing of the picture. The director was let down either by the budget, or by the shortcomings of the script, or by his own health - during the filming, Tarkovsky suffered a heart attack. The filming process was long and tedious, the technical team of the film was changed three times at the director's insistence, but the hardest thing was to let the finished film into distribution: "Stalker" was shown in the cinema only two years after the end of filming. Later, the "Stalker" was overgrown with legends due to several deaths of team members. In the early 1990s, the film's editor Lyudmila Feiginova died in a fire. Actor Anatoly Solonitsyn, performer of the main role Alexander Kaidanovsky and Andrei Tarkovsky himself died at a relatively young age, and one of the brothers-writers, Arkady Strugatsky, died at 66 from liver cancer.
Superman
George Reeves and Christopher Reeve are the most famous victims of the so-called "Curse of Superman", which, according to Hollywood belief, overtakes all superhero performers in movies. George Reeves, who played Superman from 1951 to 1958, died a week before his wedding in 1959 under mysterious circumstances: the actor was found with a gunshot wound. His successor, Christopher Reeve, the most popular movie Superman, was paralyzed in 1995 after falling from his horse. The careers of Kirk Elin, the first Superman on the screen, and Dean Kane, who played in the comic book adaptations from 1993 to 1997, were neither shaky nor shaky, and actor Lee Quigley, who played the newborn Superman in the 1978 film, died at the age of 14 from substance abuse. … We hope that the last performer of the role of Superman, Henry Cavill, will prove by his own example that this "curse" is nothing more than a series of tragic coincidences, and no evil fate is pursuing the actors of the film series.
