From The Omen to The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby there are tales of fatal accidents, devil worship, doomed planes and car crashes ...
Is this a trail of satanic hexes, or do we just want to believe?
Late night, an empty road, a car. A man and a woman speed towards a head-on collision which will kill one of them and burn an unforgettable image into the mind of the other. It sounds like the pitch for a movie but, while film is at the heart of it, this story is very real indeed.
The place is Holland, the year 1976, the date August 13 – a Friday, as bad luck would have it. The man is designer John Richardson, currently working on Richard Attenborough’s second world war epic, A Bridge Too Far, but most recently employed as special effects consultant on supernatural chiller The Omen. The woman is Liz Moore, his assistant. In a few moments she'll be dead, cut in half when the car's front wheel slices through the chassis and into the passenger seat. Richardson will survive to tell the tale – and quite a story it is too.
Less than a year earlier, he had masterminded the parade of gruesome deaths which had made The Omen a box office smash, among them the decapitation of a photographer played by David Warner. And, like everyone else who had worked on the film – including stars Gregory Peck and Lee Remick – he was well aware of the whispers and rumours which had surrounded its filming. There had been talk of a hex, a curse, a hoodoo.
The Curse Unleashed
Did he believe it? Not then, perhaps. But as he came to in the minutes after the crash, he saw something that must have chilled him to the bone: his passenger, dead from injuries which bore an uncanny resemblance to the ones he had prepared for Warner. And a road sign marking the distance to an otherwise insignificant Dutch town. It read: Ommen, 66.6 km. Today, Richardson is sanguine about his experience. Others are less inclined to forget theirs.
A Trail of Death and Misfortune
Producer Harvey Bernhard, well aware of the Hollywood gossip that had The Omen lined up as the latest in a long line of cursed films, started wearing a cross on set. "I wasn't about to take any chances," he says 30 years later. "The devil was at work and he didn't want that film made. We were dealing in areas we didn't know about and later on in the picture it got worse, worse and worse."
Bob Munger, the man who came up with the idea for the film, had misgivings even before production started. "I warned Harvey at the time. I said, 'If you make this movie you're going to have some problems. If the devil's greatest single weapon is to be invisible and you're going to do something which is going to take away his invisibility to millions of people, he's not going to want that to happen'." He was right to be worried.
In June 1975, just two months before filming was due to begin, Gregory Peck's son had killed himself with a bullet to the head. The actor set off for London in September, in a somber mood which wasn't much soothed when his plane was hit by lightning high above the Atlantic. A few weeks later, executive producer Mace Neufeld also left Los Angeles.
The curse of The Omen had begun. There was much more to come. The hotel in which Neufeld and his wife were staying was bombed by the IRA. So, too, was a restaurant where the executives and actors, including Peck, were expected for dinner on November 12. A plane they had been due to hire for aerial filming was switched to another client at the last minute and crashed on take-off, killing all on board. A tiger handler died in a freak accident.
Even when filming finished, the curse seemed to follow the actors and technicians to different projects. Richardson we know about, but the story of stuntman Alf Joint is almost as chilling. He too went to work on A Bridge Too Far, but was badly injured and hospitalized when a stunt went wrong. He only had to jump from a roof onto an airbag, an average day's work for someone like him. But this time, something odd happened. He appeared to fall suddenly and awkwardly. When he woke up in the hospital, he told friends he felt like he had been pushed.
Are Cursed Films Real or Just Myth?
The Power of Belief
These stories surrounding The Omen and other cursed films have been collected by producer Alan Tyler for a Channel 4 documentary, The Curse Of The Omen. While stories of cursed films have been around for a long time, the correlation between events inside the film and events outside it can be uncanny.
A genuine hex is when you simply can't watch a film without being aware of those extra circumstances. The Exorcist (1973) and Rosemary's Baby (1968) are two examples of films that are considered cursed due to the strange events associated with them.
Hotel Horrors
While curses in Hollywood are fascinating, it is worth noting that tales of curses and strange happenings are not limited to the film industry. In fact, hotels around the world have their fair share of mysterious and eerie stories.
One famous example is The Stanley Hotel in Colorado, infamous for inspiring Stephen King's novel "The Shining". It is said to be haunted by numerous spirits, including the ghost of a former housekeeper named Elizabeth Wilson. Guests have reported hearing her spirit calling out their names in the middle of the night.
Another hotel known for its paranormal activity is The Langham Hotel in London. Room 333 is said to be haunted by a German prince who jumped out of a window to his death. Guests staying in the room have reported strange noises, objects moving on their own, and even a ghostly figure at the foot of their bed.
Whether you believe in curses or not, the stories surrounding cursed films and haunted hotels continue to intrigue and captivate our imagination. Some may dismiss them as mere coincidences, while others find solace in the mysterious and the supernatural.
Manchester
- Manchester Hotels
- Manchester Airport Hotels
- Best Hotels In Manchester City Centre
- Hotels Near Manchester Victoria