The Poltergeist series has long been rumored to be cursed, reportedly due to the fact that real human skeletons were used in a scene from the original film. Since then, five actors who were involved with the franchise have died, some under circumstances that sound straight out of a horror movie. Take Dominique Dunne, who played Dana Freeling in the first entry, for example. Five months after Poltergeist premiered in 1982, Dunne was strangled by her ex-boyfriend, John Thomas Sweeney, outside of her West Hollywood home; she never regained consciousness.
Then there’s Julian Beck, best known to Poltergeist II fans for portraying Reverend Henry Kane. Beck died from cancer eight months before the 1986 sequel hit theaters. His co-star, Will Sampson—a real-life shaman hired to play one in the movie—followed suit in 1987, a result of post-operative kidney failure (he’d just undergone a heart and lung transplant). Sampson also apparently felt the need to perform an exorcism on the set of the film at one point.
Why People Believe the ‘Poltergeist’ Movies Are Cursed
Heather O’Rourke (Carol Anne in the original trilogy), like Beck, didn’t live to see the release of her final entry in the series: 1988’s Poltergeist III. O’Rourke began exhibiting flu-like symptoms in January of that year and went into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital. She later died from septic shock caused by congenital stenosis of the lower intestine, which doctors at the time called “distinctly unusual” because she lacked prior symptoms. O’Rourke was only 12 years old.
Lastly, we have Lou Perryman, a character actor who had a small role as Pugsley the construction worker in Poltergeist. On April 1, 2009, Perryman was murdered in his home by a man he’d met a little while earlier. Seth Christopher Tatum, who’d recently stopped taking his prescribed medication, had attacked his mother’s ex-boyfriend and fled to Perryman’s neighborhood. Shortly after striking up a conversation with Perryman, Tatum entered Perryman’s house and repeatedly struck him with an axe.
However, one person who isn’t buying the whole curse angle is Robbie Freeling himself, Oliver Robins. In 2022, Robins told Yahoo Entertainment, “I do believe in the paranormal to some degree, but I don’t think there’s a curse because those deaths can be explained.” He went on to say, “You had these tragedies happen, but they were going to happen whether [the actors] were in the movie or not. Like with Heather, she had a medical condition for which she wasn’t treated. So I don’t think they are interconnected.”
2005’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose was inspired by the story of Anneliese Michel, a young German girl who was believed to have been possessed by demons. As a teenager in the late 1960s, Michel started having convulsive seizures and was diagnosed with epilepsy. Before long, she was suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts. Eventually, Michel began experiencing hallucinations and hearing voices that would tell her she was damned.
In the midst of her alleged possession, Michel would display bizarre behavior, such as ripping off her clothes, barking like a dog, eating spiders, biting the head off of a dead bird, and licking her own urine from the floor. After turning to the Catholic Church, fathers Arnold Renz and Ernst Alt performed 67 rites of exorcism on Michel over the course of about 10 months, with some lasting as long as four hours. More than 40 audio recordings were made during that time, in which Michel could be heard growling in the voices of Satan, Judas, Cain, Nero, Adolf Hitler, and a priest named Valentin Fleischmann:
The Bizarre True Story Behind ‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’
By the spring of 1976, Michel was refusing to eat and subsequently dropped down to just 68 pounds. However, at her own request, doctors were never consulted, and she continued to slowly deteriorate. Michel died on July 1 from what her autopsy deemed “malnutrition and dehydration.” She was 23 years old.
Michel’s parents, Anna and Josef, were put on trial for murder alongside the two priests. They were all found guilty of negligent homicide for letting her starve herself and were each sentenced to six months in jail. Following the release of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Michel’s mother told The Daily Telegraph that she didn’t regret her actions. “Anneliese was a kind, loving, sweet and obedient girl. But when she was possessed, it was something unnatural, something that you can’t explain,” she insisted.
In July 1974, while Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was still being filmed in Martha’s Vineyard, the decaying remains of a young woman were discovered in the nearby Race Point Dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts. The mystery victim was almost decapitated and both of her hands had been removed—presumably to prevent anyone from identifying her. Tucked beneath her head were a blue bandana and a pair of Wrangler jeans. For close to 50 years, the girl was known only as the “Lady of the Dunes.”
Despite having been exhumed several times between 1980 and 2013, police were unable to determine who they’d found that day in Provincetown. This led to numerous theories regarding the woman’s killer, with some even suggesting that mobster “Whitey” Bulger was responsible. The decades-old cold case ended up back in the news around 2018, when an earlier blog post from Stephen King’s son, fellow author Joe Hill, resurfaced. In it, Hill pointed out that a female extra in Jaws was wearing the same outfit found underneath the Lady of the Dunes.
Did Steven Spielberg Accidentally Film a Murder Victim in ‘Jaws’? The Mystery Explained.
At about 54 minutes and 2 seconds into the film, the woman in question briefly pops up during a crowd sequence sporting a blue bandana and jeans. This young lady, according to Hill, bears a “striking resemblance” to a composite sketch of the unidentified murder victim. Though Hill acknowledged that there were several problems with his theory, like the fact that the woman in the scene doesn’t appear to be wearing Wrangler jeans, he still ran the observation past an FBI friend of his. “Odder ideas have cracked colder cases,” he was told.
We may never know for sure if the Lady of the Dunes was in Jaws, but in 2022, the FBI finally identified her as Ruth Marie Terry of Tennessee (born September 8, 1936). The following year, the case was officially closed and Terry’s husband, Guy Muldavin, who died in 2002, was named as her killer. “I’m sort of fascinated by the idea that, for decades afterwards, every time Jaws came on TV, he saw his dead wife turning her head to stare out of the screen at him,” said Hill while speaking with Inside Edition, “There’s something sort of chilling in that notion.”
Granted, I'm not the world's biggest Resident Evil fan. The only one I've played in full was Resident Evil 7, a grimy Texas Chainsaw Massacre-inspired ordeal that's about as close to disconnected from the series' convoluted overarching plot as it gets. — Read the rest
The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) is one of the classics of the ‘Golden Age’ of porn films. It was written, directed and produced by Gerard Damiano one year after the success of Deep Throat. The film takes inspiration both from Sartre’s No Exit – a play length exposition of the existentialist’s famous claim that ‘hell is other people’ – and from the Marquis de Sade’s Justine – whose titular character embodies the ideal feminine virtues of the 18th century, and is repeatedly punished for it; her innocence, piety, and honesty rewarded by a series of violations, as well as the torture, death, or betrayal of everyone she trusts (its sequel, Juliette, tells the story of Justine’s sister, who rejects both God and virtue, embraces corruption, and thrives).
The Devil in Miss Parton was released towards the end of a quiet period for angel film. After a glut of releases over the 1930s, 40s and 50s, barely anything was released between 1956 and 1968, when the genre gets going again with a series of films which deliberately play with its well-established cliches. If you’re familiar with angel films as a genre, it’s clear that The Devil in Miss Jones is written as a knowing parody of the standard tropes. The film’s protagonist Justine – having lived a perfectly virtuous life – dies by suicide, only to awaken into an afterlife where heaven is forbidden to her, yet she has not sinned enough to truly merit hell. The only solution, she is told by the angel Abaca assigned to judge her, is to go back to earth and earn her eternal damnation. She doesn’t seem enthused about the opportunity for theft, robbery or murder. What about lust, she asks?
Most of the rest of the film plays out as a series of explicit sex scenes, beginning with Justine’s encounter with ‘the teacher’ whose role is to cure her of her inhibitions, so as (he says) to make his work easier and hers more pleasurable. In each of the scenes – involving various other people, animals, and objects – the focus is on Justine. Both her pleasure and her voice are centred. At the end, she returns to Abaca, asks to be allowed to stay, only to be told that no such thing is possible, and to find herself, in the end, trapped in a small white room with a man (played by Damiano) raving about flies as she begs him to touch her.
Many of these narrative moves are easily recognisable from earlier angel films: a person awaking after death to find themselves with a lowly functionary responsible for overseeing their time in the space in between death and final judgement (Outward Bound (1930), Heaven Can Wait (1943), Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941); wishing to make up for the opportunities they had missed in life and hoping to do enough to be granted passage through judgment into everlasting life (Liliom (1934), remade as Carousel (1956), Angel on my Shoulder (1946); being tempted by the charms of the world they have temporarily been sent back to (The Bishop’s Wife (1947), The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945)). What’s striking about The Devil in Miss Jones is that it brings together these familiar tropes into a new format which seems, in turn, to become the template for two later angel films: 1990’s Almost an Angel, starring Paul Hogan/Crocodile Dundee and 1996’s Unlikely Angel, starring Dolly Parton. Both films share with The Devil in Miss Jones a very precise formula, here inverted: a protagonist whose entire life except for the manner of their death would seem to destine them for one of heaven and hell, and an opportunity to return to earth so as to make good on the promise of that very final moment, a moment of realisation about the kind of life they missed out on whilst alive, and then a final glimpse of their passage into their eternal destiny.
In Almost an Angel, Paul Hogan’s Terry Dean is a career criminal whose first move on getting out of prison is to try to rob another bank. As he does so, however, he spots a small girl about to be hit by a car and dies whilst saving her, only to find himself in a meeting with God (Charlton Heston), who describes himself as Dean’s probation officer, and tells him that while his entire life he never did anything but take, his final act of selflessness means that he’s earned a chance at heaven by dedicating his life to others; by giving instead of taking. While it takes him some time to unlearn his bad old habits, he manages to perform a series of selfless acts: befriending a terminally ill man named Steve and helping out the youth centre he runs with his sister Rose by clearing out some local drug dealers, convincing a tight-fisted evangelical that God is calling him to greater acts of charity, and comforting Steve as he dies. Whilst his attraction to Rose makes him regret the fact he cannot stay on earth, the film ends with a cross miraculously lighting up, Terry discovering that he cannot die, and a voiceover assuring Rose that Steve is with God now.
The sins of Dolly Parton’s Ruby Diamond are never quite as clear, but seem to be related to singing in bars, flirting with men, dating men who cheat on her, and never settling down to get married or have children. Driving home from a gig one night, she swerves to avoid hitting a death, and dies, only to find herself in a meeting with a man in a white suit who introduces himself as Peter and tells her that she’s lived an entirely selfish life, and that it’s only because at the very end she sacrificed herself for another living then that she will get a chance to make up for it. She’s then sent back to earth where she has to reconcile a family in the wake of their mother’s death by helping the father to recognise that his children need him and need a proper Christmas, helping the children to forgive their father, and pushing the father to marry his secretary, all while resisting her own desire to stay and take her place in the family home. As the film ends we see Dolly walking through the pearly gates, receiving her wings, and joining in the angelic chorus singing praise to God.
It’s interesting how precisely Almost an Angel and Unlikely Angel invert the plot of of The Devil in Miss Jones, itself a much looser parody of the angel film genre. While I can’t find any existing scholarship which connects the three the parallels are so precise – and The Devil in Miss Jones such a classic – that I’m convinced it must be a relatively direct influence on the two later films. The Devil in Miss Jones relates to Almost an Angel and Unlikely Angel like Justine to its sequel Juliette, mirrored narratives of virtue and vice, reward and punishment whose precise inversions reflect, however, a much more conventional moral universe than that of de Sade. It’s Unlikely Angel which more perfectly parallels The Devil in Miss Jones. Whereas Terry Dean ends by walking off out into the world, the promise of both further earthly adventures and of possible romantic consummation hanging in the air, both Justine and Ruby return in the end to their previous condition, albeit transformed by the lessons they have learned during their brief return to earth. Justine is only now able to fully appreciate the horror of the lonely, untouched life she already hated enough to want to kill herself; Ruby only now unable to sing in praise of God and in service of the middle class nuclear family rather than the dive bar circuit which she came from. Both films ultimately offer us a vision of the pleasures of sexual liberation once more safely enfolded into a narrative which sets desire against the care and self-sacrifice by which the white family is made and remade, in which sex can be recuperated as long as we do not acknowledge, as de Sade did, the pleasures of power, pain, and violence.
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