The first victim of the Exorcist curse

The Exorcist is arguably one of the most terrifying films of all time, but it's not just scary to watch on the big screen. The movie was associated with a ton of bizarre incidents like a fire that burned down the entire set (except for the possessed girl's bedroom, which is extra-super creepy) and a lightning strike across the street where the movie was premiering.

According to The Guardian, the film was also associated with the deaths of nine different people, from the night watchman to a special effects professional. Most notably, actor Jack MacGowran, who played Burke Dennings in the movie contracted influenza during the 1973 London epidemic and died from complications.

The first victim of the Poltergeist curse

Poltergeist is a classic tale of people who live in a house built on a cemetery and who are haunted by toy clowns. The original Poltergeist was one of the scariest movies of its time, so scary that some people think it irked the actual forces of evil, who rose in protest and haunted the set and the cast for real. The Poltergeist franchise is linked to so many deaths that most people have lost count, and the first was Dominique Dunne, who played the haunted family's teenage daughter. She was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in 1982, the same year Poltergeist debuted in American theaters.

The Poltergeist curse is just getting started...

The star of the original Poltergeist franchise was Heather O'Rourke, the adorable little girl who got sucked into her closet and then ended up inexplicably inside a television set in the film. O'Rourke starred in three Poltergeist movies before dying suddenly at the age of 12, just before the last movie in the trilogy was released.

According to the LA Times, O'Rourke died from an undiagnosed congenital problem – intestinal stenosis, a severe bowel obstruction that led to infection and septic shock. O'Rourke suffered sudden abdominal pain and was rushed to the hospital, where she died on the operating table.

Actual horror on the set of a horror film

In the late ’50s, The Twilight Zone was a creepy black and white television show. During all of that they decided to make a movie, and according to Slate, during filming they decided to blow something up right under an airborne helicopter, and three people died. One of the three was veteran actor Vic Morrow, who played a bigot learning some hard lessons courtesy of time-traveling, body-snatching forces of justice. During his big redemption scene, Morrow's character was supposed to rescue two Vietnamese kids from a war zone, but instead he got decapitated by a crashing helicopter. Morrow died instantly, but the franchise lived on for a while before finally dying the long, slow death of irrelevance and Netflix reruns.

to be continued...