# Horror Movies...



## Aviah (Apr 1, 2009)

*I was just reading up on something to do with The Omen, after hearing rumors now and then about its cast being part of or witnessing some pretty chilling things. Here's the article- pretty long but interesting. Just makes me wonder about the spirit behind these things and opening ourselves to it by watching them. I used to be all for horror movies, but in addition to liking my sleep at night, reading this gives greater insight. *

*from http://www.sundayherald.com/52395*







 Curse Of The Omen ... and other Hollywood Hexes


From The Omen to The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby there are tales of fatal accidents, devil worship, doomed planes and car crashes … Barry Didcock looks at some of the most cursed films of all time and finds a Poltergeist-style gumbo of death, disaster and hard-to-explain events. 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. 
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. 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 sombre 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. You think lightning doesn’t strike twice? It does in this story. “It was the roughest five minutes I’ve ever had on an airliner,” says Neufeld. 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 hospitalised when a stunt went wrong. He only had to jump from a roof on to 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 hospital, he told friends he felt like he had been pushed. 

These and other stories surrounding The Omen have now been collected for a Channel 4 documentary, The Curse Of The Omen. Producer Alan Tyler admits that he was as sceptical as anyone else when researching the project, but says he was gradually convinced by the facts. 
“What we were really shocked by is that, while there are some aspects of it where you can say, ‘I don’t really buy that’, the further into it you go, the more you’re not sure. So we went from being quite cynical to at least having doubts.”

Tyler and his team interviewed Bernhard, Neufeld and Munger as well as director Richard Donner, actor Billie Whitelaw and Richardson himself. Harvey Stevens, the young English boy who played the demonic Damien, will not speak about the hex, and Gregory Peck never went on record about it. 

But, says Tyler, “The crew that we spoke to had a sense that everyone involved in the production was freaked out to some extent. They all felt that something wasn’t quite right and that included the cast. These were seasoned professionals – they had seen a lot of productions and doubtless a lot of production accidents. Yet they themselves pick this film, more than any other, as having something extraordinary about it.” 

Of course, as Tyler’s scepticism demonstrates, stories of cursed films have been around almost as long as there have been publicists to make them up. What better way to market a film than mention a curse associated with it? What better way to boost longevity, especially in the age of the internet, where conspiracies and cults grow like digital lichen? 

And, of course, where curses are concerned, we’re all willing participants. “People really want to believe,” says Adele Hartley, director of Dead By Dawn, Scotland’s international horror film festival. “Everyone feels a little guilty about toying with the supernatural, they think maybe we are opening some doors we shouldn’t, so it’s very tantalising. I’m almost a believer.” 

Yet some of the stories simply defy explanation, cannot be explained by chance alone. For instance each of the three Poltergeist films was marked by a death – the murder of lead actress Dominique Dunn in 1982, a year after the release of the first film; the death of actor Julian Beck in 1985, as production on Poltergeist II began; and the death of 12-year-old actress Heather O’Rourke from septic shock less than a year after the release of Poltergeist III. 

So what are the ingredients of a good hex and how do we sort the real from the press release? For Mitika Brottman, author of Hollywood Hex, a new book about cursed films, you need a Poltergeist-style gumbo of death, disaster and hard-to-explain events for the rumours to start in the first place.


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## Aviah (Apr 1, 2009)

“A film will appear to be hexed if one or more of the stars has died after filming or during filming or if it turns out that the stars have drug or health problems or suicidal tendencies – something that the audience wasn’t aware of at the time. Or if there’s been an unusual pattern of co-incidences associated with the film such as a series of deaths or a series of accidents during filming. If a film falls into this pattern, then it’s subject to all sorts of scrutiny so that people find all kinds of other co-incidences,” says Brottman. 

Predictably, two of the most famous cursed films are also two of the scariest and most controversial: The Exorcist (1973) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). 

“With those films,” she says, “the correlation between events inside the film and events outside it are just so uncanny,” says Mikita Brottman. “A genuine hex is when you simply can’t watch a film without being aware of those extra circumstances.” 

The Exorcist stories turn on the subsequent travails of Linda Blair, the child actor who played the 12-year-old girl who is possessed by a demon. In 1977, aged 18, she was arrested on drugs charges. Since then she has variously gone into hiding and claimed that her experience on the film has made her resolve never to have children. Beyond that, cases of psychological disturbance among viewers are legion: the most infamous “fan” of the Exorcist movies being gay American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. He was obsessed with Exorcist III, watching the film over and over again before killing his victims. It was playing on his video when police finally arrested him. 

Even more disturbing are the stories surrounding Rosemary’s Baby. Roman Polanski’s 1968 film told the story of a young Manhattan woman whose husband trades their unborn child in a Faustian pact with a group of devil worshippers. A year after its release, Polanski’s own wife, the actress Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson Family. Tate was pregnant with the couple’s first child when she died. Chillingly one film critic, reviewing the film before her murder, described the satanists as resembling “a small, far-out Californian religious sect.” 

But even before Sharon Tate’s death, producer William Castle has begun using the c-word. In April 1969, days after receiving death threats and hate mail relating to the film, Castle is rushed into hospital with kidney failure. At one point he cries out “Rosemary, for God’s sake drop that knife.” As he convalesces, he discovers that in the same hospital is Krzysztof Komeda, the Polish composer who wrote the score for the film and an old friend of Polanski’s and Tate’s. Komeda will die of a brain clot before the month is out, a death which echoes that of Rosemary’s friend Hutch in the film. 

Two years later, Polanski would undergo his own form of exorcism by tackling a film version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, most memorable for a scene in which Lady Macduff and her children are murdered on Macbeth’s orders. It was a brave attempt at catharsis, but the stain of the Manson tragedy and the Rosemary’s Baby curse has remained with him. 

Although fictitious where Polanski is real, Superman is another who has been scratched at by the Fates. Actor George Reeves, who played the Kryptonite-fearing superhero on television in the Fifties, died of a single gunshot wound in mysterious circumstances in 1959. Most said suicide; some said murder. Two decades later Christopher Reeve took on the role and was himself paralysed after a riding accident. His co-star, Margot Kidder, later suffered psychosis. It’s worth noting that the director of the first Superman film was Richard Donner, fresh from The Omen. 

Today Kidder is unconvinced by talk of a hex. “With any group of people in life, sad things happen, and crazy things, and happy things,” she has said. “When you’re in the public eye, it’s just amplified, that’s all. There’s no curse.” 

Right. So how do you explain the continued problems the Superman franchise has suffered? Throughout the Nineties, a mooted fourth Superman movie was beset by problems, to the point that in 2003 stories began to circulate of Hollywood agents refusing to put up their clients for the role, so wary were they of the hex. Brett Ratner and Tim Burton were among the directors who joined the project only to pull out later. However the film has finally started shooting with director Bryan Singer at the helm, and is due for release next year. An unknown called Brandon Routh is stepping into the perilous red pants. 

It was another Brandon whose demise gave rise to one of the most chilling curse stories of recent years. Brandon Lee, son of kung-fu star Bruce Lee, died on the set of The Crow in 1993 in circumstances eerily similar to the plot of the film his father was making when he died in 1973. In that film, Bruce Lee is shot with a gun he thinks is unloaded; his son dies in 1993 when he’s shot by a gun that is supposed to be loaded – but with blanks. To this day, nobody really knows how a real bullet found its way on to a movie set. That Brandon Lee’s character in The Crow is shot dead the night before his wedding and then resurrected as an avenging hero has only added to the mystique that now surrounds the film – Lee was due to marry his fiancée immediately after filming stopped. 

Equally absorbing is the hex attached to Rebel Without A Cause (1955). James Dean died in a car crash, of course, but how many people know the accident happened the same weekend the film opened? Or that just weeks earlier Dean had filmed an advert for the National Highways Committee in which he can be seen asking America’s young petrol heads to drive safely, “because the next life you save may be mine”? 

It wasn’t just Dean that the RWAC curse touched. His friend Nick Adams, who had re-dubbed some of Dean’s speeches in Giant after the accident, died in 1968 from a mysterious drug overdose. Co-star Natalie Wood drowned in equally unusual circumstances in November 1981, and another RWAC star, Sal Mineo, died five years earlier in a knife fight. Troy McHenry, a Beverly Hills doctor, bought the engine from Dean’s Porsche and had it installed in his own car, but was killed the first time he drove it. The list goes on. 

As for Alan Tyler, did he feel that by making a documentary about the curse on The Omen, he would become part of it? Funnily enough … 
“Things did happen that seemed somewhat odd,” he says. “The strangest was when we had two different camera crews filming in separate locations and yet all the footage had the same fault. We just couldn’t figure out why that should be and it seemed to be on all the occasions when it was to do with something satanic. It did make us wonder.” You have been warned.


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## Shimmie (Apr 1, 2009)

Excellent Read, Aviah....      Excellent!


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## Nice & Wavy (Apr 1, 2009)

I agree with Shimmie....excellent read!


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## btrflyrose (Apr 1, 2009)

This was mentioned by G Craige Lewis in one of his sermons about the truth behind hip hop and horror movies (specifically regarding Aaliyah) and even though the audience wants to be entertained, that they do not understand that by creating and promoting something that glorifies satan, that a sacrifice has to be made.


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## msa (Apr 1, 2009)

I don't watch horror films of any sort because I've never been able to handle them, usually I can't sleep afterward and for like a week I have to have all the lights on and all that jazz.

All I know is, the subject matter of horror films, whether it's something to do with the occult or a crazed chainsaw wielding serial killer, is not for me. It just seems too real.


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## Aviah (Apr 1, 2009)

btrflyrose said:


> This was mentioned by G Craige Lewis in one of his sermons about the truth behind hip hop and horror movies (specifically regarding Aaliyah) and even though the audience wants to be entertained, that they do not understand that by creating and promoting something that glorifies satan, that a sacrifice has to be made.



Yeah, I've seen that one, its true.


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## Ramya (Apr 1, 2009)

I don't watch horror movies. There is a very 'real' aspect to them that I noticed from a young age. It's not innocent and I take no part in them.


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## blazingthru (Apr 1, 2009)

I use to watch them not at first i never went to a movie and see one but I would at a friends house or at home with a bunch of people around but I notice that I develop a strong fear that I didn't have before and things that did not make me afraid, frighten me terribly now. So I avoid them at all cost.


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## btrflyrose (Apr 1, 2009)

blazingthru said:


> I use to watch them not at first i never went to a movie and see one but I would at a friends house or at home with a bunch of people around but I notice that I develop a strong fear that I didn't have before and things that did not make me afraid, frighten me terribly now. So I avoid them at all cost.




I'm starting to realize a lot of things that I didn't realize before.

Especially as I continue to ask the Lord for help with truths and knowledge and to reveal those things to me that are not of Him so that I can rebuke and avoid them!

So many things...music, movies, books, that are given to the masses, are easy, so extremely easy to access, and are packaged as normal, fun, entertainment.   Unfortunately it is these things that carry the message of something so much more sinister than what we may see on the surface.


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## blazingthru (Apr 1, 2009)

btrflyrose said:


> I'm starting to realize a lot of things that I didn't realize before.
> 
> Especially as I continue to ask the Lord for help with truths and knowledge and to reveal those things to me that are not of Him so that I can rebuke and avoid them!
> 
> So many things...music, movies, books, that are given to the masses, are easy, so extremely easy to access, and are packaged as normal, fun, entertainment. Unfortunately it is these things that carry the message of something so much more sinister than what we may see on the surface.


 
I so agree


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## mrselle (Apr 1, 2009)

btrflyrose said:


> This was mentioned by G Craige Lewis in one of his sermons about the truth behind hip hop and horror movies (specifically regarding Aaliyah) and even though the audience wants to be entertained, that they do not understand that by creating and promoting something that glorifies satan, that a sacrifice has to be made.




I didn't know that he ever mentioned Aaliyah.  What did he say?


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## Ms.Honey (Apr 1, 2009)

I used to LOVEEEEEEE horror movies but after I got saved and started having some serious supernatural stuff happen to me they scare me in a totally different way now. 

I do like the ones were good triumphs over evil and the devil is defeated like Constantine with Keanu Reeves though but stuff like Halloween and the Exorcist......


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## preciouzone (Apr 1, 2009)

mrselle said:


> I didn't know that he ever mentioned Aaliyah.  What did he say?


 *The devil demands a sacrifice by G. Craige Lewis*

He mentions about horror movies, the death of tupac, biggy
and aaliyah in this video -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1q4HIv-bGA&feature=channel


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## btrflyrose (Apr 1, 2009)

preciouzone said:


> *The devil demands a sacrifice by G. Craige Lewis*
> 
> He mentions about horror movies, the death of tupac, biggy
> and aaliyah in this video -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1q4HIv-bGA&feature=channel



Thanks for posting that.

He also mentioned how Aaliyah was quoted saying that she is like the night and like the Vampire Queen and that she likes the dark.

It's some really sad stuff.


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## preciouzone (Apr 1, 2009)

I didn't know this but he mentioned how it's like the character
she was depicting is actually in her and how she likes the dark and 
the night and she feels like shes also a vampire.  He also mentioned
towards the end of the video how they found her in some swamp covered
with stuff on her face and snakes around and in her last video this was
actually one of the scenes that she shot... just as she was found??


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## Crackers Phinn (Apr 1, 2009)

The actor who played Jesus in Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ was struck by lightning on the set of the movie.  

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3209223.stm

Does this hold to the same standard?


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## moonglowdiva (Apr 1, 2009)

*I can't watch horror movies, action adventure, or suspense movies because they affect me. We (christians) have to be very careful of the thing we take into our spirit because the powers of darkness are for real. And if you are a spiritually sensitive person then you will experience evil things from taking in this type of media. There is no such thing as coincidence.*


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## HeChangedMyName (Apr 2, 2009)

I use to watch them and be scared out of my wits, but I liked it. . . .Then I got pregnant and was a part of a superstitious family that told me I couldn't watch them while I was preggo. . . .then a friend of mine started to explain to me how that fear and those movies open your spirit up to things that you don't really want to mess with.  

I'm not superstitious anymore, but I can specifically remember very strange sensations while I tried to watch the Exorcist as a child.  Even with one eye covered and barely any sound on the tv, I felt in danger.


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## Evolving78 (Apr 2, 2009)

i don't watch movies where people or animals are being tortured, or movies that involve rape.  these movie don't sit right with my spirit at all and it creates fear in me and fear for my children's safety.  i used to watch Law and Order SVU all of the time until i got pregnant.  i couldn't handle that stuff anymore.  it is crazy how creation of these types of movies started in someone's mind!  it is creepy that there are people out there that allow there thought to go there.  that is very wicked and evil.  Rob Zombie is crazy.  every movie he makes it's outrageous and always has rape and people being tortured.


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## BeautifulFlower (Apr 2, 2009)

After The Ring, I was done. I dont like scary movies. They influence your thinking, sleep, dreams. You get paranoid and feel weird. No thanks. 

I also know I have to stop watching shows like Charmed...I love it but its not making a case for Jesus or God for that matter.


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## Iammoney (Apr 3, 2009)

i vowed to never watch scary movies again until one day i was looking for the trailer for the haunting of Conneticut (sp) on youtube there is the documentary on the events that happened in the house, i had no idea about it. i watched the whole thing I so scared i waited until my brother got home to go to sleep and even then i had to pray and pray and watch some comedy to ease my spirit. I was shook.  NO more exceptions. its to much for me.  my brother told me his friends saw it and the parents had to bless the house.  I understand now.


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## zanna (Apr 6, 2009)

The last Batman movie, the actor also died under wierd circonstances too(I never want to see that movie: it celebrates evil) I am God's child and I don't put bad things in front of my eyes.
I stay away from most movies: they are mostly satanic and mind controling nowadays.

And I really think that bad spirits enter people's houses though the TV or get to people in the theatre. So stay away, we are children of God, we shouldnt watch those things, they do not glorify God.

This is what I wrote I a thead I started some time ago:

"The media, movies, the bad and the occult 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Everyone, 
didn't you notice how the media, and the movie industry throw at us occult movies, occult themes constantly now?

All we see are trailers for scary occult themes for adults and children. When it's not that they (movies, shows and even the news) show dark and evil actions, greed, love for money and materialistic things, jealousy, fornication and all the sins in the book.
There is an agenda behind that- mind control: desensitization and acceptance of the occult as being normal and all sins as being normal: everything is turning into bad and evil more and more.

Now is the moment to separate our selves- we are children of God-
Let us not put anything bad in front of our eyes.
Lets us wear the full Armor of God (Eph 6: 10-18)"

Zanna


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## msa (Apr 6, 2009)

prettyfaceANB said:


> After The Ring, I was done. I dont like scary movies. They influence your thinking, sleep, dreams. You get paranoid and feel weird. No thanks.
> 
> I also know I have to stop watching shows like Charmed...I love it but its not making a case for Jesus or God for that matter.




I loved Charmed when it was on television and I was going to buy the full complete DVD set. I was at the store with a friend (from church actually) and I picked it up and she was like how could can you buy that? Look at the case it comes in. 

Well it comes in a "book" that looks just like the book of spells they have on the show with that symbol on the outside. I had a duh! moment right then and there. While I thought the show was harmless, what it represents definitely isn't and it didn't become obvious to me until she pointed that out. Thank goodness for people who will correct you when you need to be corrected.


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## Casarela (Apr 11, 2009)

Wow...we were having this discussion last week at the bible study. The pastor was telling us how we should avoid certain types of movies  because very often what we may interprete as a simple story may be waaaaaaaaaaay more complicated and release bad things in our lives. He was refferring the the movie with the rock the mommie and how it was a big hit. Also, he showed us a screen  shot of the movie cover and back there was this Pharaon god of death on the left side and right side. He was saying how we may think that were only watching a movie but its much more deeper than that and that it can release a lot of bad things in our homes and spirit.

Also he mentionned how God works in the light, whereas evil spirits work in the dark and in every implicit possible ways thru different itermediaries. 

As for myself I HATTTTTTTTTTTTTTE horror movies and that was since a young age. I cannot stand them and really stay away from them.


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