Movie sets have to be some of the safest places on earth.
Bound by strict safety regulations, studios do their darndest to make sure cast and crew
get through production unscathed.
After all, they wouldn’t want to get sued.
Still, the safest movie set in the world isn’t immune to everything.
So when accidents happen on set, or when cast and crew members die under mysterious circumstances,
it’s tempting to wonder if something supernatural is to blame.
Here are Screen Rant’s 10 Creepy Curses That Haunt Famous Hollywood Movies
The Dark Knight Everyone knows the fate of Hollywood heartthrob
Heath Ledger.
After turning in his iconic turn as The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s comic book masterpiece
The Dark Knight, Ledger died of an accidental overdose on sleeping pills.
But that wasn’t the only bad thing that happened to people involved with the film.
While it was still filming, a special effects expert died on set after a vehicle carrying
a camera crashed into a tree.
After it came out, Morgan Freeman was involved in a car accident which landed him in the
hospital.
Nevertheless he returned to film The Dark Knight Rises.
Presumably, the curse had lifted by that point.
The Curse of Billy Bob Thornton Speaking of Heath Ledger, the young actor
co-starred in Monster’s Ball with Billy Bob Thornton back in 2001.
Nowadays, people know Thornton as the beloved character actor from such films as Waking
Up in Reno, Sling Blade, Daddy and Them, and Bad Santa.
But who were his co-stars in those other movies?
Well, in Waking Up in Reno, Thornton shared the screen with Patrick Swayze, who died of
pancreatic cancer at the early age of 57.
Actor JT Walsh died of a heart attack in 1998, just two years after co-starring in Sling
Blade.
Daddy and Them is the last film of Ernest-star Jim Varney, who died of lung cancer at age
50.
And Bad Santa has two premature deaths associated with it: John Ritter passed away in 2003 while
Bernie Mac succumbed to a heart attack in 2008.
This probably doesn’t have anything to do with Billy Bob, but it’s a creepy coincidence,
nonetheless.
The Conqueror Sometimes known as the the movie that killed
John Wayne, The Conqueror is a 1956 epic about Mongolian leader Ghengis Khan.
In the case of this film, the curse is real.
The Conqueror was filmed in St. George, Utah, which happened to be downwind of a nuclear
weapons testing site in neighboring Nevada.
Out of 220 cast and crewmembers, 91 eventually developed cancer.
John Wayne, the director Dick Powell, and co-stars Susan Hayword and Agnes Moorehead
all died of cancer eventually.
Another co-star, Pedro Armendariz, took his own life after learning that his condition
was terminal.
Producer Howard Hughes -- yeah, the guy Leonardo DiCaprio played in The Aviator -- felt so
guilty about this that he purchased every print of the film and kept it from being screened
until his death.
The Oscar Love Curse Here’s another curse that might be real,
the Oscar love curse.
This theory holds that women who win the Oscar for Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress
are more likely to see their marriages and relationships go down in flames.
Stars like Julia Roberts, Reese Witherspoon, and Sandra Bullock have seen their long-term
romances come to an end not long after winning an Academy Award.
Apparently, there might be some truth to this curse.
In the journal Organization Science, two professors conducted a study of the so-called curse and
determined that it might be real.
They determined that the upward positive shift in social status could have a detrimental
effect on the marriage.
So if you want to stay married, folks, it might be a good idea to stay away from the
Oscar spotlight.
Psycho When anyone brings up the classic horror film
Psycho, only one scene comes to mind: when Janet Leigh’s character gets murdered in
the Bates Motel shower.
The rest of the movie may be a masterpiece, but that scene is terrifying.
What makes it more terrifying is the history that surrounds it.
Myra Davis, who was Leigh’s stand-in on the film, was raped and murdered in 1988.
In 2001, a handyman named Kenneth Dean Hunt was convicted for the crime.
In the book The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shower, writer Robert Graysmith describes
Hunt as a Psycho obsessive who wanted to kill Leigh’s body double from the shower scene.
Instead, he got the wrong woman.
Davis was Leigh’s stand-in for lighting checks, but Leigh’s body double was actually
Marli Renfro, a former Playboy model who is still alive and well.
The 27 Club The 27 Club refers to the large number of
famous young people to have died at the age of 27 years old.
In 1969, Rolling Stones bassist Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool.
Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin both died of drug-related causes the next year while The
Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison passed away mysteriously the year after.
When Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain took his own life in 1994, music lovers began referring
to “The 27 Club”.
Amy Winehouse is the latest rock star to “join the club”, but she’s not the only 27-year-old
celebrity to die in recent years.
27-year-old Star Trek star Anton Yelchin was killed by his Jeep Grand Cherokee in a freak
accident earlier this year.
Atuk Atuk is the only film on this list that was
so cursed it never actually got made.
In 1982, John Belushi was in talks to play the lead character Atuk, a heavy-set Inuit
man from Alaska who gets lost in New York City.
After agreeing to take the role, Belushi died of a drug overdose.
The role eventually went to Sam Kinison, who actually shot some scenes as the character
before production halted over creative differences between Kinison and the producers.
He later died in a car crash.
Then, John Candy expressed interest in playing the role, but sadly passed away before it
could get made.
Finally, Chris Farley expressed interest in the role shortly before his death in 1997.
Something tells us this movie is never going to get made.
The Terminator Curse You could also call this the John Connor curse.
Two of the actors who have played John Connor over the years have had their lives turned
upside down by addiction.
Furlong played a young John Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but he became addicted to
cocaine and heroin as a teenager.
He still pops up from time-to-time in low-budget B-movies, but Furlong’s career has never
recovered.
In 2003, Nick Stahl took over the role of John Connor in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,
but in 2012 his own addiction troubles came to light when his estranged wife reported
him missing for multiple days.
He works mainly on independent films now.
Thankfully for Christian Bale, who played Connor in Terminator: Salvation, the curse
doesn’t seem to have affected him.
James Dean’s “Little Bastard” Curse In 1955, James Dean tragically died in a car
crash.
He was driving a customized Porsche 550 Spyder, which he affectionately referred to as “Little
Bastard”.
After the crash, however, a string of mysterious accidents followed the remainder of the car.
Parts of the Little Bastard eventually made their way to into two separate cars owned
by Troy McHenry and William Estrid.
They both crashed while racing each other, killing the former and seriously injuring
the latter.
While being used for a safety exhibit, the remainder of the Little Bastard survived a
fire at a garage and broke someone’s hip after falling off its display.
Later, it fell off a truck while being transported and killed its driver.
This is one Hollywood car we do not want to drive.
Superman Curse The Superman Curse begins with George Reeves,
who portrayed the character in the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Superman.
After his career was hampered by typecasting, Reeves was tragically killed by a gunshot
wound in 1959.
The next actor to don the tights was Christopher Reeve in Richard Donner’s Superman in 1978.
Reeve played the superhero until 1987’s Superman IV.
But in 1995, he was paralyzed from the neck down in a horse-riding accident.
So far, no horrible life-changing events have been brought down on Tom Welling or Brandon
Routh, but there’s no doubt that their careers haven’t quite taken off in the years since
they’ve played Superman.
Perhaps Henry Cavill, the latest actor to take on the Man of Steel, can turn things
around for the character.