Poltergeist opened in June 1982 and became one of the biggest hits of the year. Directed by Tobe Hooper from a story by Steven Spielberg, it followed the Freeling family as ghosts in their new suburban tract house reached out through the television and pulled their youngest daughter, Carol Anne, into another dimension. MGM followed it with two sequels, in 1986 and 1988. By the time the third film opened, the actresses who had played both Freeling daughters were dead, and the press had a name for what seemed to be happening: the Poltergeist curse.
What happened
The first death came within months. Dominique Dunne, 22, who played the teenage daughter Dana, was attacked in the driveway of her West Hollywood home on October 30, 1982, by her former boyfriend, John Sweeney, a chef at a fashionable restaurant. He choked her until she lost consciousness. She was kept on life support for five days and died on November 4. Sweeney was convicted of voluntary manslaughter the following year and released after serving roughly half of his sentence.
The second film added two names. Julian Beck, the co-founder of the Living Theatre who played the gaunt preacher Henry Kane, had been diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1983, before he took the role. He died in September 1985, months before the film reached theaters. Will Sampson, remembered for playing the silent Chief Bromden in the 1975 film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, played the shaman Taylor; he had told cast and crew he believed the set was troubled and performed a ceremony to cleanse it. He died in June 1987 of infection and kidney failure, about two months after undergoing a heart-lung transplant.
Then, on February 1, 1988, Heather O’Rourke, who had played Carol Anne in all three films, died at Children’s Hospital in San Diego at the age of 12. She had fallen ill suddenly; her family first thought it was the flu. Doctors found an intestinal obstruction she had been born with, which had led to infection and septic shock, and her heart stopped during surgery. Some months earlier she had been treated for what doctors believed was Crohn’s disease. Poltergeist III opened that June with a dedication to her. According to the American Film Institute’s catalog, MGM reportedly did not want the press to link her death with Dunne’s. It did anyway.
The skeletons
The detail that gave the curse its logic came from the first film’s best-known scene. JoBeth Williams, as the mother, is dragged into the family’s muddy, unfinished swimming pool and finds herself surrounded by corpses rising from the mud, the remains of a cemetery the developers had moved without its bodies. In a 2002 television interview Williams said she had assumed the skeletons were plastic and later learned they were real; in 2008 she added that the production used real ones because fake skeletons would have cost far more to make. Snopes found corroboration under oath: in a 1982 deposition for an unrelated lawsuit over the screenplay, the film’s makeup effects artist said he had acquired a number of real surgical skeletons, the kind medical supply houses then sold for teaching. For believers, a film about the dead disturbed by careless builders, made with the actual dead as props, explained everything that followed.
The explanations
The record does not need a curse. Each death has a documented ordinary cause: a domestic killing, an illness diagnosed before filming, a chronic disease ending after major surgery, and a rare congenital defect that was missed. They involve different films, different years and different mechanisms, and the actors who played the parents, Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams, went on working for decades. Large casts and crews over six years will include people who become ill or die young, and a famous horror franchise makes those losses more memorable. Later deaths, such as that of Lou Perryman, a minor actor in the first film who was killed in 2009 by a stranger who broke into his home to steal his car, have been added to the list with even less reason. Oliver Robins, who played the Freeling son, has said he does not believe in the curse.
Where it stands
The use of real skeletons is one of the few parts of the story that holds up; MGM told Snopes it could not confirm it, but the sworn testimony and the actress’s account agree. The rest is a collection of unrelated tragedies, two of them involving young women whose deaths deserve to be remembered for what they were.