“When people are suggesting choices he made could have potentially led to the deaths of actors involved in the production, he takes extreme personal offense to that,” says Cheel.
The resulting interview is impactful, impassioned, and rare because Reardon points out that using human skeletons on movie sets is part of a long tradition in Hollywood. He also emphasizes it is gratuitous, and ghoulish even, to trivialize the deaths of two people by connecting their tragedy to a curse.
“I think he saw it as some cathartic opportunity to just lay it all out there,” reflects Cheel, as opposed to other interviews about the “curse” where interviewers are “more interested in all of the crazy stuff that happened on these sets, and lining all of those incidents up in a row so that it suggests something supernatural.”
However, while Cursed Films does not reinforce the notion of curses, it does explore it seriously. And some films, such as Poltergeist, tend to attract legends especially when the plot somewhat mirrors the curse stories.
“The more incidents attached to a film, the more power the story has,” he says, but adds that with Poltergeist, there is a source to the curse–at least for believers. The human skeletons used on set during filming led to the bad fortune.
