In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, the social psychologist Steven Pinker recalled an experiment from his postgraduate days involving buttons and beeps. Volunteers were asked to sit at a desk and tap a key whenever they heard a short, high-pitched electronic sound – which, Pinker explains, was generated entirely at random by a machine.
“The listeners, graduate students themselves, knew this,” Pinker explains. “But as soon as the experiment began they would run out of the booth and say, ‘Your random event generator is broken. The beeps are coming in bursts. They sound like this: beepbeepbeepbeepbeep… beep… beepbeep… beepitybeepitybeepbeepbeep.’ They didn’t appreciate that that’s what randomness sounds like.”
Pinker’s experiment captures what psychologists call the clustering illusion: our tendency as humans to find patterns and intention in chance events. But when it comes to the clustering illusion in cinema, such pattern-spotting adds to the spooky appeal. Over the past century, a handful of films have gained the reputation of being cursed, because of the grim events that occurred around their production.
The most infamous is Alex Proyas’s 1994 gothic superhero thriller The Crow, whose 28-year-old star Brandon Lee was fatally shot with a dummy round during the filming of a scene that portrayed his own character’s demise. (A presumably highly safety-conscious remake, with Bill Skarsgård in the title role, is released this month.)
Lee’s death was a major news story at the time – and rumours soon latched themselves to it. Supposedly, a cryptic message had been left on the production office voicemail, warning of dire consequences if the shoot went ahead. On the very first day, a carpenter reversed a cherry-picker into an aerial power cable, was electrocuted, rushed to hospital and lost his ears. Weeks later, a fearsome storm blew through North Carolina, destroying parts of the set.
There was also the dubious relevance of Brandon Lee’s late father, Bruce Lee – whose last, unfinished film, Game of Death, was rewritten and released posthumously with the martial-arts icon playing an actor who is shot by a would-be assassin on set. Back in 1973, Lee Sr’s own untimely death at 32 had prompted whispers of gangland vendettas and family jinxes – conspiracy theories that were quickly revived.
Then there was the source material: a comic book inspired by the death of its creator’s fiancée in a drink-driving accident. And its Byronic hero’s über-morbid aesthetic – white face paint, black everything else – which was instrumental in pushing the goth culture of the 1990s into the mainstream. Barely a month before the film’s release, Kurt Cobain, the frontman of the rock band Nirvana, had died by suicide: death was in the air, and at the forefront of the young minds of the film’s intended audience.
For Dr Stuart Wilson, a senior lecturer in psychology, sociology and education at Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret University, this alignment of tragedy, gossip and lore made The Crow prone to cursed status.
“A lot of human cognition is pattern detection,” he explains, “and we are particularly good at noticing clusters. So a cluster of negative events, even ones associated with a movie, can be particularly salient – and that’s when culture takes over and labels like ‘cursed’ start getting attached.” Negativity bias – our habit of being more swayed by the bad things we perceive than the neutral and good – also comes into play. “These systems are screaming at us that there’s something worth paying attention to here.”
Inevitably, horror attracts much of that subconscious screaming. The Exorcist (1973) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) are just two genre classics whose troubled productions became mythologically entwined with their blood-curdling content. In the case of Poltergeist (1982) and its sequels, two tragedies that befell young cast members chimed eerily with the plot of the first film, in which a five-year-old girl is pulled into the netherworld.
Heather O’Rourke, who played the young abductee, died at the age of 12 during the filming of Poltergeist III (1988) due to complications from an undetected bowel obstruction. And Dominique Dunne, who played her teenage sister in the original, was strangled by a former boyfriend mere months after its release. Additionally, two adult actors from the cast of Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) died around that film’s launch – one shortly beforehand from stomach cancer, the other a year later, of kidney failure, following a heart and lung transplant. All of that was more than enough to prompt talk of a curse, which swirled around the fact that real human skeletons had been used as props in the first film.
For sheer cataclysmic range, though, most curses would struggle to top the one that supposedly affixed itself to Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976), in which a couple’s adopted son turns out to be the Antichrist. Lightning proved a particular issue. Various members of the cast and crew, including its star Gregory Peck, had their planes struck by it while flying to the set in London. Later, out on the street in Rome, the producer Harvey Bernhard was nearly frazzled by a wayward bolt.
Production was dogged by further calamities and close shaves. A private jet, almost (but not) chartered to transport Peck to another filming location, later crashed on take-off, killing everyone on board. The IRA bombed Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair after Peck booked a dinner there, and Donner’s hotel the day after the director checked out. A zookeeper who handled animals on set was mauled to death by lions. A few months after The Omen’s release, a special-effects supervisor’s girlfriend perished in a road accident that roughly mirrored a grisly decapitation scene in the film.
Robert Munger, who came up with the premise of the film, would later claim that Satan himself was determined to stop the film being made. Though note that Munger was both an evangelical Christian and an advertising executive: read into either or both of those attributes what you will.
Even in light of Pinker’s beeping, this might sound like a lot to put down to chance. But one of the examples he uses is of repeated lightning strikes. Say your house is zapped at random once per month. The likeliest day on which the next bolt will strike is always the day after the previous one. That sounds absurd – but, as Pinker explains, “For a given day to be the next day that lightning strikes, all the previous days have to have been strike-free, and the more of these days there are, the lower the chances are that the streak will continue.” Don’t blame Beelzebub, it was maths all along.
But as Wilson points out, mythology is more persuasive than equations, especially when a film already seems to be on nodding terms with hidden forces. “Explanations involving intentional agents are much more satisfying than those involving randomness – see also the compulsion towards conspiracy theories,” he explains. “We also prefer simple explanations, so thinking of something as the result of a curse takes less cognitive effort than engaging with complex chains of causality that would probably offer a more complete explanation.”
Reckoning with the actual whys and wherefores can also be an unpleasant business. During the filming of a stunt sequence in 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie, a helicopter crashed on set, killing the actor Vic Morrow and two child extras, who were working in contravention of Californian labour laws. An investigation found the helicopter’s rotors had been damaged by a pyrotechnic explosion, causing it to spin out of control; witnesses claimed the director, John Landis, had ordered the pilot to fly lower to the ground – Landis denied such an order had been given. Five members of the crew, including the pilot and Landis, were tried for manslaughter; all were acquitted.
The Twilight Zone incident led to an industry-wide tightening of safety standards – but even today, film sets remain more dangerous than we might like to believe. According to recently published US government data, at least 194 serious accidents occurred on domestic television and film sets from 1990 to 2014, 43 of which resulted in deaths.
And if the notion of death as an ingredient of cinema makes us profoundly uneasy – as it should – the films themselves have often used that unease to their advantage. From the possessed VHS tape in Ring (1998) to the macabre footage in the attic in Sinister (2012), fictional cursed films are themselves deeply unsettling. Perhaps it’s because by watching them we become the audience they were made for – and that makes us complicit.
Back in reality, meanwhile, this is something every film-lover has to wrestle with: beloved features are sometimes born of traumatic shoots. Arguably the most cursed film of all is also one of the sweetest ever made: The Wizard of Oz (1939). The ordeals of its stars have been well documented, from Judy Garland’s regime of amphetamines and barbiturates, to keep her slim and energised, to the original Tin Man, Buddy Ebsen, poisoning his lungs with powdered aluminium from his make-up, to Wicked Witch actress Margaret Hamilton ending up in hospital with second- and third-degree burns due to a malfunctioning trapdoor on set.
But that wasn’t enough for the curse to be getting on with. In the 1980s, when home video made obsessive rewatching possible, rumours began to circulate that a lovelorn Munchkin had hanged himself on set – and that during the Tin Man’s introductory sequence, his body could be seen in the background, swinging from a branch. In fact, the indistinct shape is a large bird, probably either an emu or a crane, which had been brought in from the Los Angeles Zoo to waddle through the background of the scene. But that explanation is a lot less compelling than going to a friend’s house and scanning your childhood favourite for corpses, frame-by-frame.
Whatever you do, don’t turn to YouTube for reassurance. Because in the most popular versions of the scene available online, an actual swinging silhouette has been subtly and convincingly inserted. That’s the problem with curses: they can’t be easily dispelled.
The Crow is in cinemas from Aug 23
