Selects: Can movies be cursed?

Introduction

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Saturday Selects

1:52Hey, everybody. Happy Saturday. Chuck here with your Saturday Selects. And this week, I think it inspired me because recently we did an episode on the movie Roar, the most dangerous movie ever made, supposedly. And so let's go back to November of 2017, the 16th to be exact, to talk about movies being cursed. And this episode that runs at 56 minutes long, Can Movies Be Cursed? Please enjoy it right now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,

2:23a production of iHeartRadio.

2:31Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. My tongue is super big today for some reason. Gross. And this is Stuff You Should Know. I know. It's like... I sound like Peter Overby, for God's sake. Who's that? You know that guy's voice anywhere. He's like an NPR reporter. Oh, yeah. And like, he has me even beat for the large tongue's candy-sucking sound.

Dentist Stories

2:57Do you remember when we first came out, people would write in and be like, tell Josh to stop sucking on candy while he's podcasting. And I'd just be like, that's my normal voice, man. Yeah, thanks a lot. Yeah, appreciate that. But now, now that we're high rollers, they provided me with a private nurse to suction out the saliva every 30 seconds. Oh, my God. And then Jerry has to edit it out. So gross. Gross but true, right? Like a cursed movie story true?

3:28Yeah, do you know what I hate at the dentist besides everything? Man, that was a pretty good segue. I know that I just totally mowed over. It's all right. I hated the dentist now. You know, you don't have to spit anymore because they do have those suction things. But it's still, like I still do the fake swallow. You know how it feels like it builds up in the back of your mouth? Yeah. So like they'll be in your mouth and you'll just go, like that. I hate that. That's funny. Do you do that? Does everyone do that? A gag reflex thing? Well, it's not even a gag reflex.

3:59It's just the hard swallow, the dry swallow. Yeah, the sort of swallow reflex, if that's such a thing. Do you feel like you're going to break your vocal cords or your throat muscles? God, I hate that. I know what you mean. I don't hate it, though. I think it's kind of not enjoyable, but I don't know. And I hate it when they talk to you and expect you to talk back. They can talk, but yeah, there can't be any questions involved. Maybe rhetorical questions that you can shrug at. That's it. My last hygienist, I really didn't care for her.

4:33Like it was a personality thing. And they have TVs at my dentist that they'll put down in front of you, which is fine. I don't really care. But she would stop and like look and make comments about the news and stuff. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Like in the middle. Why don't they just let him do his job? I didn't like it. It was really annoying. And then I came back in not too long ago, and there was a new hygienist for me, and she was awesome. And on the way out, I was like, by the way, I was like, I won't say her name. I was like, but this new hygienist I really like a lot.

5:05She was like, what about before? I was like, I wasn't crazy about her. And she went, no one was, and you guys need to tell us that. And we let her go because we got all these complaints. Huh. Started flooding in. I was like, well, I feel bad. Like I don't want to get anyone fired. Sure. But I didn't. There was, she wasn't good.

Cursed Movies

5:23Huh.

Cursed Movies

5:23So anyway. Was this in Brookhaven? Uh, yeah. Is it Brookhaven? How do you know where my dentist is? Well, I just had an experience in Brookhaven, and I'm like, this town is just small enough for that to be possible. Well, I'll go ahead and shout out my dentist, the great Dr. Daryl Kimchi. She's wonderful. Kimchi? Uh-huh. That's one of my favorite foods. Well, but is that your dentist? Uh, no. Okay. But it's possible that we're talking about like a hygienist that gets fired pretty frequently.

5:58Maybe. You know? She's making the rounds in Buckhead, Brookhaven. Right. Yeah, Dr. Daryl Kimchi of Atlanta Cosmetic Sports Dentistry. Wow, that is quite a shout out. I think Dr. Kimchi owes us some free kimchi. Maybe. As a thank you. She's sort of a celebrity dentist. She does a lot of the sports people in Atlanta. And the Real Housewives? Maybe, but I went in and they have memorabilia up everywhere. And when the TV show was out, I gave them a poster and they never put it up. Oh, no way. That's hilarious.

6:30Yeah. Wow, that's great. That reminds me of the Friends when Joey tried to get his head shot up at the, I think it's like the dry cleaner or something. Right. And they wouldn't do it. Man, that is so stuff you should know. All right. Well, this has got a nice loose start. Indeed, Chuck. But this is a fun one. But let's begin, shall we?

Poltergeist

6:48Well, yeah, this was written by the Grabster. The article is 10 movies that were supposedly cursed. And Ed goes to great lengths to point out how there is no way that anything can ever be really cursed. Right. I think probably his couple lines where he's like, just so stupid. I know. Where it was edited out. You know? I get the feeling he got a sign that this was like, oh, God, are you kidding me? Mm-hmm. I want to write about real stuff like Satanic Panic. But he does love writing about movies. He's definitely a movie guy. Yeah. Especially horror movies. And it seems like more than any other movie, horror movies, they're the variety that tend

7:22to be associated with curses more than other types, right? Or at least the marketing department cooks that up. So, yeah. That's definitely par for the course these days. But there was a more innocent, gentler time when rumors of Satan influencing the production of a movie was a legitimate rumor. You know? It wasn't a PR stunt. So, like you said, Ed goes to some trouble to point out what's actually behind the idea of a movie curse. That some things are bound to happen on just about any movie set.

7:54Oh, yeah. Especially when you stop and consider, especially in the early days, the kind of stuff they were doing with the technology they were working with at the time, of course bad things happened on movie sets. Of course people died. Like, for example, I looked this up, right? There was a 1928 movie called Noah's Ark, and they used 600,000 gallons of water to create the flood scene. One take. They did one take and three extras drowned.

8:26One guy who did survive had to have a leg amputated. It was broken so badly because this is the flood scene, and you needed to basically get it as real as possible. Isn't that crazy? That is, yeah, especially back in those days. But they didn't care back then. Right. They were just like, oh, they're just extras. Who cares? Although John Wayne, it turns out, was an extra on that movie, but he survived, obviously. Yeah. And he factors into another curse. He does. He also worked in the special effects department on that movie.

8:56Or prop. Prop. Sorry. Prop. Like special effects was what? He did early CGI. Right. He would clap the coconuts together. For all the horse scenes. Right. But hold on, I have another one, okay? Uh-huh. So this is another movie. Years later, they died with their boots on. I think it's about the Charge of the Light Brigade, maybe? Okay. Uh, it was a 1941 movie starring Errol Flynn, and during this cavalry charge that they recreated, three extras in that movie died, just in that one shot, that one scene.

9:32One of the guys was thrown from his horse, and he threw his sword, like, away from him. Unfortunately, he threw it ahead of himself, and the sword stuck into the ground, handle first, and he was impaled on the sword. Wow. This is, this happened on a movie set, and it's not just like back in the day, either. 1983, the Twilight Zone movie, very famously, there was a disaster, right? Yeah, that was, uh, it was very sad. That's when Vic Morrow and two children, uh, were chopped up by a helicopter blade.

10:04Right. Uh, very infamously, it was terrible, terrible tragedy. Yeah, Shin Yee Chan and Micah Din Lee were the two child actors who were killed. So, things do happen on movie sets, and again, when you stop and think about what they're doing, it's often very dangerous. So, what Ed is saying is, when you start to put these things together, and then you get rid of all of the things that don't support your point, you got a curse on your hands. Should we start with Poltergeist?

10:35Yes. Poltergeist, that's one where people always list this as a cursed movie, because, uh, quite a few of the actors died sort of unexpectedly after the movie. Um, and then Ed goes on to say, very astutely, but it's also a textbook example of why the idea of curses is silly.

10:58Have I mentioned that curses are silly? Right. All over and over. So, three of the, uh, those first three Poltergeist, 82, 86, and 88, uh, I didn't see the remake, did you? I didn't even know there was one. Yeah, of course there was. They remade it a few years ago. No, I didn't. I didn't see it. No, I don't think it was very popular, but, um, Dominic Dunn, or Dominique, excuse me, her father was Dominic Dunn, correct? Yeah, and her brother was Griffin Dunn, or is Griffin Dunn.

11:31Yeah, uh, she was, uh, well, she was murdered. Um, she was murdered by her boyfriend. John Sweeney. Yeah, and that was a very disturbing case. Uh, have you ever poked around that case? Yes. Like, the signs were all there. It was one of those things that could have been prevented. And he, he got away with it, for the most part. Yeah, he did, like, three years in prison. And Dominic Dunn, her father, uh, he was there every day for the trial of the man.

12:02Oh, yeah. Just, just crushed by the injustice of the sentence that the guy received. Well, it changed his life. He became a crusader. It did, yeah. He, uh, you can read some of the best, um, coverage of high-profile murder cases, um, in the pages of Vanity Fair that he, he covered for years and years and years as a direct result of him basically covering his own daughter's, uh, murderers trial. Yeah, OJ very famously, he covered that case. Yeah, he did. Um, and he, uh, apparently the Dunns, uh, spent a great deal of time basically keeping tabs on John Sweeney for years.

12:40Yeah, he was a chef for a while. He was. Uh, and I even started tracking him down. This, I just went down the rabbit hole, like, six or eight months ago on this for some reason. Really? Yeah, it was just one of those, you know, things where you see something on Facebook and then all of a sudden you go, oh, yeah, and then you go down the rabbit hole. And I was, I was trying to find this guy. I was like, where is this guy? Where is he? And the last I saw, he was some chef somewhere. Um, I think he had changed his name even, of course. Yeah, to John Mora, M-A-U-R-A. Yeah, well, keep changing that name, buddy.

13:12Because it's, it's going to follow you around. Yeah, and I mean, like, there was no question whether he did it or not. He admitted to it, like, he told this guy who had, who had been in the house at the time in, um, Dominique Dunn's house rehearsing lines to call the police that he just killed his girlfriend. Yeah. Um, but yeah, he, he was hounded for many years. And I guess toward the end of his life, Dominique Dunn said, you know what? I'm not going to waste my life, like, keeping tabs on this guy anymore. And, um, just, just dropped it.

13:42But yeah, there's a lot of people out there who don't like that dude. Yeah, I would imagine so. So, um, so she died by murder. Um, then the, the young girl. And this was like a couple months after Poltergeist came out, right? So it was very close to the production. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She was not in the sequels, obviously. Um, Heather O'Rourke was the little girl in Poltergeist. Mm-hmm. And she passed away after, uh, in 1988 after Poltergeist 2, uh, was wrapped.

14:12And she initially was diagnosed with the flu. We talk about this in our flu episode a little bit. Yeah. But what she really had was, uh, an intestinal blockage. And at the tender age of 12, uh, she had a heart attack and sepsis and passed away. Super tragic. Yeah. And, um, so those two dying so close to the production of the actual movie. She died, it was Poltergeist 3, I believe, that Heather O'Rourke died after filming. They were basically done.

14:43Did Ed get it wrong? Ed got it wrong. Oh, man. Uh, and then Dominique again died, uh, just a couple months after the first Poltergeist came out. So that's, like, one big hallmark of a, of a movie being cursed story is the deaths that happen typically need to happen either during production or right around production. Right. Okay, so those two are the big ones. But then people say, oh, oh, still not convinced? Well, listen to this. Uh, in Poltergeist 2, there was an actor named Will Sampson who played, uh, Taylor the medicine man who helps the family.

15:18Yeah. And he is better known for playing the chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Yes. One of the great characters of all time. Um, he died, uh, I guess after filming, a few years after filming. The year after filming, um, in 1987, uh, he died following a heart and lung transplant. Yeah, and he had a, he had a history of health issues. He was a giant man. Yeah. And, um, so that was, you know, again, tied to the curse.

15:49But what can you say about someone who just dies sort of of natural-ish causes? After a heart and lung transplant. Yeah. I think there's pretty good odds. Yeah. Um, and then there's, um, Julian Beck who played the scary, scary, scary preacher. Yes. Kane in, also in Poltergeist 2. Man, he was creepy. He died, I guess, before Poltergeist 2 actually came out. So that would have been close to, um, the production as well. So it checks those boxes, but he died of stomach cancer and he apparently, um, had a long-standing

16:23issue with, um, battling it as well. Um, so, um, you can make the case it doesn't really count, but are you really trying to make a case about curses? Yeah. Well, let's just talk about him instead about that. Agreed.

The Wizard of Oz

16:39Okay.

The Wizard of Oz

16:39What's next? The Wizard of Oz is next. That's right. 1939. Great, great movie, but, uh, a great movie that was marred by, uh, for such a happy movie, it had some, some rough stuff going on because it was in the early days of making movies. And like you said earlier, back then it was, they didn't know or care as much about safety. Like, for instance, the tin man, Buddy Epson, they, they said, all right, we need to make you look, uh, silver. And so we'll just coat you with aluminum powder.

17:12And that stuff was really dangerous. He went to the hospital. It irritated his lungs, uh, and he could not even continue in the role. No, luckily he survived to go on to play Jed, the dad in Beverly Hillbillies. Thank God. But he was out of the Wizard of Oz. He was. So Buddy Epson was replaced by Jack Haley. And they said, well, we probably shouldn't use that same aluminum powder. So they used an aluminum paste, which didn't get into his lungs, but to give him a really bad eye infection. Man.

17:42Right. So the aluminum, just the tin man role itself had a bunch of problems, but that was just one of many. Uh, Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West. Mm-hmm. She was burned pretty badly with, uh, some of the pyrotechnics from the movie. And, um, I think she, she was on, she was hospitalized, but she came back and, you know, completed work on the movie. Yeah, but she said she wasn't going to do any more firework. Apparently the trap door that she was standing on, the timing of it wasn't, wasn't right. Yeah. So it didn't open up and drop her right before the fireworks went off, but did it simultaneous

18:18to the fireworks going off, which is not what you want. No. But it was 1939. Right. So they were like, whatever, what are you going to do? Uh, there's the, the very famous urban legend, which is not true, but it bears mentioning that one of the munchkins, uh, hanged himself in the background of a scene. Yeah. And if you just Google image that junk, uh, hanged munchkin, Wizard of Oz, it will, it will have a screen cap with a little, uh, circle around it. I mean, it doesn't even look, it just looks like something that is not a tree.

18:51In other words, it's not attached to the ground. Right. It doesn't necessarily look like a hanging munchkin, but apparently there was a bird. Yeah. It doesn't look like a bird to me either though. Like supposedly it's a silhouette of a bird. And if you watch the, like a closeup of the video of it, it does sway back and forth above the ground. So, I mean, you can see where, where people came up with that for sure. Yeah. But that, that is not the case. There was no munchkin that, uh, that just couldn't take it anymore. There's actually, there's a really great horror fiction story by, I think a guy named Steve

19:21Nagy called the hanged man of Oz looking up and reading. It's pretty good, but it's about this dude kind of becoming obsessed with that, that, um, rumor and seeing it on video and not being able to unsee it and all the stuff that happens after. I think it's Steve Nagy. It's definitely called the hanged man of Oz. All right. I'll check that out. Um, other tragedies in wizard of Oz, uh, Auntie M, Miss, uh, Clara, uh, Blandick. She killed herself. Um.

19:52At age 81. Yeah. And she left in her suicide note that, um, that she was going on her greatest adventure. Well, that's kind of nice. I guess so. It's about as pleasant as it can get with the suicide note, I think. Uh, the wizard himself, Frank Morgan, uh, he was injured in a, in a car wreck just a few months after they released the movie. Uh, and then of course, Judy Garland had one of the more tragic lives in Hollywood history.

20:21Yes. They're making a movie about her soon, I think. She, uh, I can't believe they haven't already. I think they've done it on TV, but not a big movie thing, I don't think. She was basically owned by MGM. Yeah. Like, almost, almost the definition of being owned, right? Um, she was, uh, like, discovered at age 13, I think in Kansas, actually, uh, at a state fair. And they said, um, well, we're just going to buy you from your parents, basically. And they took her and they said, well, you can't get fat.

20:55So smoke 80 cigarettes a day. Yeah. They basically prescribed her that. They got her on amphetamines to keep her going. They, they let her have one square meal a day. Terrible. Yeah, really. So, um, she, and she, yeah, if there, Ed makes a really good point. If there was any real tragedy that came out of the Wizard of Oz, it was Judy Garland's life. Yeah, absolutely. So she eventually would die by suicide herself on an overdose of barbiturates.

21:28And, um, I think it's, she had the equivalent of 10, uh, secanol capsules in her body. Good Lord. Yeah. Well, man, that's sad. I want to see that movie. Do you know who's going to play her? Oh man, I just saw this the other day. I can't remember who, but I remember thinking, yeah, good casting. Oh, okay. Like it wasn't Owen Wilson. Right. That'd be pretty bad. Uh. Give it your troubles. Come on, get happy. So, right, uh, she was, uh, 47 years young, by the way, which is far, far too young.

22:04Sure. To have lost Judy Garland. Yeah. Uh, you want to take a break? Yeah, on that downer, yes.

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24:49All right, Chuck. So there's actually a role, Superman, that's considered a cursed role. Did you know that? I did know that because I remember as a kid, even though I'm not, you know, 65 years old, I like to watch reruns of stuff like Gilligan's Island and Green Acres and Petticoat Junction.

25:22Oh, really? I've never seen Petticoat Junction as a kid. Yeah, I mean, you know, it was one of those old shows. They're all great. What about F Troop? F Troop's probably one of my favorites of all the time. Yeah, I watched F Troop. I watched all that stuff.

25:33Superman, the name of the show that I watched was called Adventures of Superman. And that was straight up from the 1950s and still in reruns in the mid-70s at least. Yeah. Because that's where I watched it. And that was the one starring George Reeves as the not even very muscular and slightly tubby Superman. Yeah, like that kind of like 50s fit. Yeah, kind of barrel-chested. Chunky and just weird, like weirdly shaped. Yeah. Like what were they, what kind of exercise were they doing back then?

26:06Well, I don't think they did exercise back then. Wasn't that the deal? Oh, is that what it was? Yeah, they were just like, you know, you're going to play Superman, so eat a bunch of steak. Right. Like buff up a little bit. Right. Do some push-ups maybe. So he, George Reeves, he's George Reeves. Christopher Reeves is not plural. It's a singular version, right? Yes. George Reeves became synonymous with Superman. Like everybody thought of him as Superman. Too much. Like he wouldn't be cast in anything else, right?

26:36And he had some, he had to put up with quite a bit being known as Superman or recognized as Superman. Apparently kids would come up and like punch him in the stomach to see if he was made of steel. Well, there, I looked into it, I learned this years ago from the Uncle John's bathroom reader, and I looked into it, and I think it actually may be correct. But at one, like, public appearance, he had to talk a kid out of shooting him. Like this kid had brought his father's loaded .38 caliber pistol to shoot Superman to see if the bullets really bounced off of him.

27:11And George Reeves got the kid to put, to hand the gun over to like a cop or something because he told them that, sure, of course the bullet would bounce off of him, but it could ricochet and hurt somebody else who was standing nearby. Yeah, that was in the Ben Affleck movie, Hollywood Land. Is that right? It's about George Reeves, and that scene was in the movie. Okay. I've not seen that movie, I've never heard of it. Yeah, it's okay, it's not great. You lost me at Ben Affleck. It's not bad.

27:41But, yeah, he talks the kid out of it in the movie and said exactly what he said, like, of course, blah, blah, blah. And then he takes it, then you can see him, he's just like, oh, God, Jesus, like I almost got shot. Right. Yeah, so, yeah, that was, I can't imagine the relief that would wash over you after that. Yeah, so George Reeves, Reeves? Reeves, yeah, he's the plural. It's tough to keep up with. It is. He had a very sort of sad life, which is in that Hollywood Land movie.

28:11He, like you said, he couldn't get other work, and he was only known as Superman, so I think he turned to the booze and was not a happy guy. And eventually, in June of 1959, there was a, he was having a party at his own house. His fiancée was throwing a party, and he said, I'm going to go upstairs and shoot myself in the head. Yeah, and Ed makes it sound like he was upset about the noise or something like that from the party? Nah, I mean, that may have been the straw, but he was upset about life.

28:44I gotcha. And I got the sense, like, legitimately depressed, you know, like, clinically depressed. Right, yeah, I mean, like, it's, it's, as we get to know more and more about, like, depression, it's so much easier to look back at, like, you know, people who were depressed before, but you just never really kind of pegged them like that because people didn't know about that kind of thing. And then it's just sad to see, like, how many people suffered like that because no one knew what was going on, or they just thought it was the blues, or you should just snap out of it, you know?

29:21Right, yeah. We've never done one on depression. I think we should. Have we not? I don't believe we have, man.

29:29Well, then we should definitely do that. We have done one on cats. And then Christopher Reeve played Superman, and that is why some say it is a cursed role because he was very sadly injured in a horse riding accident in the mid-90s, which left him paralyzed from the neck down. And he became very much an inspiration to people because he became an advocate for research into spinal cord injuries, and he went on to direct and even act some as well after that.

30:01And Ed also points out that after Christopher Reeve died, his wife, Dana, who saw him through this whole thing, she died of cancer like two years afterward. Yeah, I just, man, I felt so awful for that family and those kids. Yeah, I mean, just to get, like, that random, to be thrown from a horse and then just be paralyzed from the neck down, yeah. So you put those two together, and everyone says, well, Superman is a cursed role.

30:31Correct. What would the grabster say? No such thing as curses. So stupid. The Conqueror is a movie that, like we said, John Wayne factored in, and this one was definitely, I don't know about cursed, but, well, here's the story. Okay. It is very unlikely that John Wayne would play Mongolian Genghis Khan. He did, though. But it was Hollywood back in the day where they just would cast white people to play whoever.

31:03Right. And he played Genghis Khan, and they shot the Conqueror in Utah less than 150 miles from the Nevada test site, sorry, Nevada test site, where our own U.S. government set off 11 nuclear detonations above ground the year before. Just in the year before. Yeah. And that area was crawling with bad stuff, lingering fallout in the dirt and in the rocks and like everything.

31:37It was in the soil, and they were just running around in there filming movies. Yeah, I read this really interesting article in The Guardian called Hollywood and the Downwinders about the people who lived in that area who suffered tremendously from health problems from the fallout. And the government went to great lengths to cover it up and just assured everybody that there was no danger whatsoever to them, even though their houses and schoolyards were covered in radioactive ash.

32:08And so from filming there, when this production came to town and they filmed there, yeah, they were exposed to the same radioactive debris and dust and dirt that these people who lived in the area were as well. And as a result, supposedly something like 91 out of 220 cast and crew members who worked on location for the movie The Conqueror came down with cancer later on in life, which is highly unusual statistically speaking.

32:43Yeah, that's like 40-something percent of the crew. And years later in People magazine in 1980, they actually did a special report on that movie and the cancer connection, like John Wayne, Agnes Moorhead, Gene Gerson, Susan Hayward, the director, Dick Powell. They all died of cancer, and in that People magazine, Dr. Robert C. Pendleton, he was director of radiological health at the University of Utah, said that this would hold up in a court of law that's such an outstanding number of people.

33:17Yeah, and apparently not even just the people who worked on the production. It came to be known, The Conqueror came to be known. By the way, it's considered one of the best bad movies of the golden age of Hollywood. But people who visited the set battled cancer later in life, too. Both of John Wayne's sons who came to visit him, there's a famous picture of him with two of his sons and a guy using a Geiger counter on set. Wow.

33:48Both of his sons had cancer later in life, too. But supposedly, the family and Dick Powell's son, Norman, who's interviewed in that article I read, they discount the idea that people got cancer from that test site. They say maybe it was a contributing factor, but these people all smoked heavily, ate steak like eight times a day. Yeah. And that they had a lot of other risk factors that probably led to it. But it's also entirely possible that they may not have died of cancer as early had they not filmed at that site.

34:25Well, that Dr. Robert Pendleton said essentially that this is about three times the rate of cancer that you would expect. Right. So I think that it definitely contributed. It's pretty curious. I want to see it. Have you ever seen The Conqueror? No. I got to see this. I've seen pictures of John Wayne as Genghis Khan. Yeah, it's pretty cringy. Yeah, super racist. But apparently, even if you take all that away, just the dialogue is awful. Yeah. The whole premise of it is he kidnaps a woman and forces her to marry him, and of course, romance blossoms as a result.

35:00You know, just the usual stuff from the 50s. The Omen. Yes. This is a good one because this is one of those where it's a movie about the devil, and so all these stories are going to be heightened. Right. Because it's kind of like Poltergeist. Like, it wouldn't, if this was when Harry met Sally and some of this stuff happened. That, when Harry met Sally was cursed with great laughs. It was. I love that movie.

35:31Mm-hmm. One of the few romantic comedies that were legit good movies. Yeah. You know? Yeah. So, let's go back to the beginning of this one. Obviously, The Omen, everyone knows, was the great movie from 1976 about the Antichrist taking, well, I guess possession, you could call it. But it's not like an exorcist thing. Basically, the Antichrist is this little boy. He comes back as a little boy. Yeah. Yeah. And a bad, bad, naughty little boy.

36:01Damien. Who dresses like Angus Young. Uh, yeah, sure. Okay. So, Damien is adopted by Gregory Peck in the movie. Mm-hmm. Um, and in real life, Gregory Peck's son, um, killed himself. He died by suicide, uh, apparently out of the blue. No suicide note or anything like that. Yeah. Um, and this was before production had started, but after Peck had agreed to do the movie. Right. And he still went ahead and did the movie.

36:33Um, he left the U.S. and went to London. And even, even on the way to London, before he even got to London to start shooting, something happened to him, right? Yeah. He said, I'm going to get on a plane and fly to London. His plane was struck by lightning. Right. And the producer's plane was struck by lightning. Separately, these are two different, two different planes struck by lightning on the way to start shooting in London. So this curse thing is feeling legit this time. This is the one that even Ed got a little shaky on, if you ask me.

37:03How about this? The hotel where they stayed, uh, at least where the producer and some other folks stayed, was bombed by the Irish Republican Army. Yeah, Hilton, the London Hilton. I don't know about, uh, a curse in that case, because the mid-70s, there was a lot of that going on. Yeah. The IRA was bombing all sorts of stuff back then. Yeah. So it was- Like a restaurant where the crew and the cast went to eat one night. Yeah. They were about to go eat there. So there's actually, like, all these close calls actually make it seem like this movie production wasn't cursed, but instead was actually being looked out for on high by the

37:38Dark Lord.

37:40Right? So, like, the crew that was going to go to dinner didn't go to dinner. They didn't make it there in time for the bombing. Right. The people who were staying in the hotel when it was bombed weren't there yet. Um, there were a lot of close calls, but there was one close call that really is, is just mind-numbing. I would have freaked out had I been one of the people involved. The private jet? Yeah. So they chartered a private jet to, um, fly them around London to get some good aerial

38:11footage of London. And at the last minute, the, um, charter service switched planes to accommodate a group of Japanese businessmen. Well, the plane that the Japanese businessmen took that the crew was supposed to be on crashed on takeoff, actually crashed into a car and killed everybody on board the plane and everybody in the car it crashed into. How about that? And this is like a last minute switch too, supposedly. Yeah. Those make you think. Yeah. That, I mean, curse or no, just knowing that you were that close would just, that'd get

38:45you. How about this? A worker, there was an animal, uh, animal sanctuary where they filmed and a worker there was killed by a tiger. Yeah. That one, uh, I think that one fits. I think that was the actual animal wrangler for the movie was killed. Oh, really? Yeah. Which makes it even closer. This is the one though, Chuck, you got to take this one home. This is the one that really gets everybody, even though I think it's like a lot of it's made up. Yeah. There was a car crash with, uh, John Richardson, who was a special effects, uh, worker.

39:18Uh, he designed the effects for the omen. Including a very famous decapitation scene toward the end. Yes. Very famous. And, uh, oh, I thought that was at the beginning. Was it the beginning? I think so. I think it's how it opened if I remember, but it's been a while. Oh, okay. Either way. Um, he was in Holland after working on a movie called A Bridge Too Far, and he was involved in a head-on collision in his car and was injured. But his assistant, Liz Moore, was decapitated and killed in that car wreck. Mm-hmm. And he claims, and I don't know if this is lore or not.

39:51Sounds lore-ish. It does sound lore-ish, but he claims that he awoke from that crash and looked up, and there was a street sign, uh, where they crashed that said the distance to the next town, and it was the town of O-Men, O-M-N-E-N, at a distance of 66.6 kilometers. Bam. Now, is that true? There's no way it's true, because I looked up on the internet that sign, trying to find any picture of that sign. If that sign existed, there would be so many pictures from tourists taking photos of it

40:25on the internet. There's not a single one. You think from back then, those pictures would still be around? Uh, the sign would probably be, still be around. Well, see, I think that's the presumption that may not be true. Like, they may have taken the sign down for that reason. Maybe. I guess that's possible, but no picture of it whatsoever. That no AP photographer went, I gotta get a picture of that sign. Nobody did. That there's no existing photo of that sign. It does seem hinky, for sure. Yeah. That's the one that makes me think, like, meh. Although, there is a town called Omen in the Netherlands, so it's entirely possible a

40:59crash took place by there. So that checks out? That definitely checks out. So we're gonna take a break, everybody. We just decided. But we're gonna be right back, so don't worry, because we're gonna talk some more about cursed movies. Spectrum Business keeps businesses of all sizes connected seamlessly with fast, reliable internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, and mobile services.

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43:52All right. We're back, as I promised. And we're on to Brainstorm, which I think Ed was just kind of showing off with this one. Because he even says, like, you're not going to find this on many lists of cursed movies. Yeah. I'm not sure I get the curse in this one, but we'll talk about it. Brainstorm was the 1983 sci-fi movie most famously known as being the great Natalie Wood's final film. Right. Because she died in real life after the movie, obviously, when she drowned after being out

44:30on a boat one night partying with her husband, Robert Wagner, and her co-star, Christopher Walken. Right. Under some say, many say, mysterious circumstances. Yeah. I was reading up about that case, and they apparently had been drinking since at least four in the afternoon, and they made it back to the boat pretty late, and they'd been drinking through dinner. They were all just pretty crocked, right? And supposedly, Natalie Wood was either afraid of water and or couldn't swim. Yeah. And for some reason, she had tried to get into a dinghy that was attached to the boat that

45:07they were staying on and probably hit her head and drowned. That's the story. That's the official story, right? But apparently, in 2012, it was reopened, or her cause of death was changed from accident to undetermined. Yeah. I mean, there were stories that she and Robert Wagner had been fighting. The captain, even many years later, said that he actually killed her. No charges were ever brought. Christopher Walken, for his, I think he's never talked about it publicly, if I'm not mistaken.

45:41No, he finally did, years and years later, in a Playboy interview, and he basically said it must have been an accident. No one knows, but surely it was an accident. That was what he said. And that's probably the only thing he said, because I didn't think he ever said anything. Yeah. He said, it's an accident, clearly.

46:03That was great.

46:09Because that was, that was Christopher Walken with just a hint of John Travolta. Yeah, it was a little Travolta-esque. So, yeah, I mean, that's tied to Brainstorm as being a curse, I guess, because they were both in the movie, even though the Grabster points out that some people tied this back to a Rebel Without a Cause curse, because... That makes way more sense to me. Yeah, because James Dean and Sal Mineo, and Natalie Wood, then all died from that movie. Relatively young. She made it the longest.

46:39She was in her early 40s, I think, when she died. But James Dean died, very young, in a car crash right after Rebel Without a Cause was released, I think. Yeah, and I think when Sal Mineo murdered? He was murdered in 1976, at a pretty young age still. He was stabbed to death in the heart, in an alley behind his house. Yeah, so... By a pizza man. To me, oh, really? Yeah. Huh. That's a little weird. Well, it is, but I mean, we're talking about curses, so...

47:09Well, I mean, usually the pizza man gets stabbed, you know what I'm saying? Right. I think this guy was actually a serial-killing pizza man. Oh, wow. Yeah. I just saw recently, is there a serial killer in, like, Central Florida? I don't know. I hadn't heard anything, but aren't there, like, at least 50 serial killers operating at any given point in time? I don't know, but I do know that I saw something that I heard, that, like, three murders in the Tampa area were just linked. Oh, man. I think, and that made me think, it's been a while.

47:41Yeah, you don't hear about him very often, but as I grow older and wiser, I'm starting to think, like, there's a lot more serial killers out there than you would imagine. That, like, human life has very little value to more people than you would hope, you know? Yeah. Isn't that the darkest thing you can think of? It's pretty dark. Like, uh, the last high-profile one I remember is BTK, but surely there's been one since then, right? Yeah. Because he was, like, early 2000s, right? I know, but I can't think of one. I can't either, man. But it's been a long time since, you know, we've heard of, like, Jeffrey Dahmers and,

48:16uh... Man, that was shocking. ...Ted Bundy's and stuff like that. Yeah. Thankfully. Sure. The Son of Sam's and the Zodiacs. It seems like the 70s and 80s were sort of the time where that was happening more. Yeah. I don't know why. Maybe it was harder to get away with it or easier to get away with it or... I don't know. Who knows? I'm listening to that Heaven's Gate podcast. Have you heard that yet? Oh, I haven't heard that. No. It's good. It's from our buddy Chris Bannon over at Midroll. Put it out. And, um... Is he hosting it?

48:47No, no, no. Glenn Washington narrates it. But, um... I've been through three episodes now. It's really good. But it's kind of funny, man. That time of the 60s and 70s, it was just... And we talked about it some in our cults episode. It was... People just believed more in trying stuff out like that. And UFOs. And it was all just kind of in the mainstream. And it just all seems so unbelievable now. But back then, it wasn't... It was kind of believable that someone might join up with a cult.

49:17But... Well, a lot of people were on grass back then. Yeah. On the grass? Yeah. That's crazy. I got to hear that podcast, man. That's just a fascinating story. But now that means we can't do Heaven's Gate because... Bannon did it. Yeah. And then they did... You know, you can't cover in 45 minutes what they cover in whatever, 10 episodes. 10? Sounds about right. I'm not sure. I haven't... I don't think they released it all at once. But it feels like a 10. Let's say 7 to 10.

49:46So anyway, can we close on Brainstorm? Or are we still... Did we miss something?