Movie sets of evil

My Filipino father-in-law was remarking a while back that The Dark Knight, the Batman sequel that focuses on the nature of evil, might have attracted some bad mojo during its production. “Look at Heath Ledger — dead! And Christian Bale! Arrested for beating up his mother and sister!” “Allegedly, allegedly…,” I qualified. Well, it was enough to get me thinking this Halloween season about certain movies, and whether they attract evil onto the set. First of all, I’m not sure that evil isn’t already present — indeed, rampant — on most Hollywood movie sets. But that’s another matter.

One movie that seems a precursor to the Dark Knight curse is The Crow — Brandon Lee’s doomed lead role in a film that examined what happens when a pale and gaunt guy is killed and comes back as a pale and gaunt avenging ghost. Evil is all around in this movie, and perhaps it was a simple prop mishap that led to Lee’s death by gunshot during production… or maybe not. The “curse” tag gains credence when you consider that Brandon’s dad — Bruce Lee — also died young in a freak accident — a “misadventure” while dubbing dialogue for his final movie, Enter the Dragon. Lee reportedly swallowed a painkiller that swelled his brain, resulting in cerebral edema.

The granddaddy of cursed movie sets, though, is said to be William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, filmed in 1972. But in truth, not much went wrong during the making of this blockbuster shock-horror flick. Sure, teen actress Linda Blair went on to some infamy involving drug and alcohol abuse, dating pop singer Rick Springfield, and hosting Fox TV’s Scariest Places On Earth. And yes, director Friedkin, coming off a career high that included The French Connection, never made a movie as successful as The Exorcist. But this doesn’t qualify as a “curse.”

A stronger case could be made for 1976’s The Omen, another film about Satan’s presence in modern life that actually had a lot of freaky occurrences during — and after — its filming, including a bolt of lightning striking the airplane of screenwriter David Seltzer and actor Gregory Peck (shades of the lightning bolt causing the death of a priest in the movie) and a fatal car crash — on a Friday the 13th, no less — that caused the decapitation of a special effects artist’s girlfriend, eerily echoing a similar scene in the movie.

(In a related bit of curse trivia, director John Moore, who filmed the crappy Omen remake last year, claimed two days of footage was ruined by “supernatural occurrences” on his set. He told reporters that a malfunctioning remote-control camera on the set kept lighting up “Error 666” — a message that repairmen insisted does not exist. Sounds like he wanted some of that original Omen mojo to rub off on his horrible remake. It didn’t work, unless you consider box-office failure a “curse.”)

Then there’s the Poltergeist curse. This Steven Spielberg production about a house possessed by spooks after greedy builders construct on a Native-American burial ground had three untimely deaths: Heather O’Rourke, the 12-year-old girl who played Carol Ann in three Poltergeist movies, died during filming of the third installment due to complications from Crohn’s disease. Actor Julien Beck also died during filming of the 1986 sequel. And actress Dominique Dunne, who played the older daughter in the first movie, was killed by a jealous boyfriend the same year the movie came out.

Is it dangerous to play around with the devil? Do bad things happen when filmmakers make light of evil? This would be a convenient explanation. And it’s no doubt true that evil enters the consciousness of those working on such films. How else to explain Adam Sandler’s Little Nicky?

But bad things happen everywhere, and we can’t really claim that Satan rides shotgun on certain movies just because they happen to celebrate… him.

Yet the circumstantial evidence is there, for those who like scary stories. Take Roman Polanski, whose Hollywood career was taking off with the huge success of Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, about a woman (Mia Farrow) who suspects her unborn child is being sought by Satanists. A year earlier, he had cast a young actress, Sharon Tate, in his vampire spoof, The Fearless Vampire Killers. Two years later, Tate — then married to Polanski and carrying his child — was ritualistically murdered by followers of Charles Manson in her California mansion. Spooky stuff.

Then there’s the Rebel Without a Cause curse. Just about every actor associated with this 1954 hit died tragically: James Dean in a car crash right after his third film, Giant, was released; Sal Mineo from a knife attack in Hollywood in 1976; and Natalie Wood, who drowned at sea after falling overboard from a yacht in 1981. Only Dennis Hopper — who had a small role in the film — lived to tell about it. Talk about the luck of the devil.

Real-life horrors do occur on movie sets, and these are enough to taint the film and call into question its subject matter — as director Jon Landis learned after a tragic helicopter crash during the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie back in 1983. Two Vietnamese child actors and actor Vic Morrow (who was famously decapitated by a chopper blade) were killed in the crash, which doomed press for the film and led to a decade-long lawsuit against the producers and, eventually, stronger safety regulations for actors and stuntmen on movie sets. So maybe it had a positive outcome after all.

One bona fide “curse” encircled the filming of the 1956 John Wayne movie, The Conqueror, with The Duke playing Genghis Khan. But the curse has been traced to human causes. It seems a large cluster of people involved in the filming of this Howard Hughes box office bomb developed cancer over the years and died. The reason? Besides a flash flood that nearly killed the entire crew, and a black panther which attacked the film’s lead actress, the crew filmed its desert epic in Utah’s Snow Canyon, which had been the site of US military nuclear testing in the early ‘50s. The radiation clouds that collected in the canyon nuked some 91 of the 220 crew members, including Wayne himself, who died of cancer.

Not even 007 is immune to movie curses. The latest James Bond entry, Quantum of Solace starring Daniel Craig, has reportedly had three unfortunate deaths tied to it prior to release: while filming in Italy, one stunt driver drowned after driving an Aston Martin into a lake; another stunt man crashed an Alfa Romeo and was in critical care; while a third British crew member was stabbed to death during a break in filming. Craig himself had some bad luck during the shoot: he received eight stitches in the face filming one stunt, and lost the tip of his finger filming another.

And of course, this year also saw the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which seemed to bring out the demons in both Ledger and Bale (though assault charges have been dropped against the British Batman — that guy definitely owes his mom dinner and a dozen roses).

But it doesn’t end there. Conway Wickliffe, a special effects technician on the film, was killed while performing a stunt on the London set. And Dark Knight star Morgan Freeman was involved in a car crash on a Mississippi highway soon after the movie was released.

Maybe it just goes to show: if the devil don’t get you, Hollywood will.