Cursed Films - Reality vs. Legend In This Fascinating Docu Series
Are curses real? Or is it that in us believing in them they become real? We start to see patterns we wouldn’t have noticed before. We start to be more fearful, more careful. Or are curses real and powerful?
Cursed Films is a new five-part documentary series coming to Shudder soon. Each episode focuses on one horror movie set that was supposedly cursed. But this isn’t your boring 20/20 repeat of the facts everyone knows. This goes DEEP ya’ll. It delves into why we believe in curses, what really happened on these sets, and speaks to witches, black magicians, professors, directors, journalists and covers the entire spectrum of a “curse”.
The first episode I got to see is all around 1982’s Poltergeist and the rest of the film series. This is, of course, a famously cursed series. They take us through the deaths of Heather O’Rourke, Dominique Dunne, Julian Beck, and Will Sampson. All members of the films that passed away around filming. They cover the “real” skeletons supposedly used in the swimming pool scene, and the death mask.
Featured in this episode is Ryan Turek, April Wolfe, Phil Nobile Jr, and Sean Clark who all speak about cursed items and the psychology behind why we, as horror fans, love the lore of a cursed set.
What struck me the most about this episode was the sadness. I think we lose a grip on reality when it comes to horror history sometimes, and we tell our campfire tales like, “did you hear that little girl died on set?!”. When we are actually far from the truth. And also that these stories affected those involved deeply. Seeing those on this episode who knew Dunne personally and knew O’Rourke talk about their deaths is incredibly emotional and not something I expected.
It’s a beautifully handled episode, and one of the things I loved the most was when April Wolfe spoke about how cruel the real world is, and how comforting it is to invent these campfire stories and curses to sort of lessen the reality that horrible things can happen to very good people.
The next episode I got to see takes us through The Omen and holy shit I had no idea so many tragedies occurred around this film - everything from two planes getting struck by lightning, IRA bombs going off, animal handlers eaten, car cashes and decapitations. WTF.
This episode takes us even further into the lore behind curses and into the black magic that a lot associate with curses. And of course, with The Omen being a film about Satan, it also dives into the religious aspects of curses. Mace Neufeld talks a lot about the production along with Richard Donner, the Director.
In this episode they talk a lot more about patterns and how we as a society look for patterns and how we completely ignore other patterns. We see what we want to see. There’s a great clip called the Gorilla Experiment that I won’t spoil, but it totally blew my mind. There was also a great example used about seeing patterns using Mark Chapman killing Lennon.
These two episodes of Cursed Films are incredible and I can’t wait for all of you to see them, and I can’t wait to finish the series!
The series will premiere on Shudder Thursday, April 2, with The Exorcist episode, followed by the Poltergeist and The Omen on April 9 and The Crow and Twilight Zone: The Movie on April 16.
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