Scottish play to modern day: Exploring ‘cursed’ horror cinema and the morbid legacy of tragic film sets

All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be cursed hereafter

Did you hear about Linda Blair getting a permanent spinal injury on the set of The Exorcist? Or perhaps that the filming of The Omen that caused a suicide, multiple plane disasters, a bombing, a tiger-mauling, and a decapitation? Did they really eat monkey brains in Faces of Death?

For avid horror fans, the knowledge of cursed films comes as part of the territory: the fact that Brandon Lee died on the set of The Crow, for example, is almost synonymous with the movie itself. I would go so far as to say that, often, knowing that a film has some “real” paranormal haunt attached to it is part of the draw of a cursed movie. When the too-familiar jumpscares and claims of “based on a real story” no longer raise the hairs on the backs of our necks, horror fans must consistently grasp for something that will elicit that heart-dropping terror in our guts. And what better to achieve this than the threat of real danger, right there on the cinema screen?

Wanting a bit of reality in our horror isn’t typical only of modern audiences. Perhaps the first instance of cursed media can be found in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Infamously, the play was staged at a time of puritanism and a mass distrust of witchcraft. In response to this (and, perhaps, to King James VI’s obsessive fear of the occult), Shakespeare released a play that, according to rumour, featured incantations pulled from real witchcraft. Since nobody in the 16th century had the means nor compulsion to fact-check or cite sources, audiences were wary of Macbeth – and yet, this didn’t stop them from spilling into The Globe to watch its performance night after night. Nor, for that matter, did it stop further theatre companies from staging it, even when accidents began to occur related to its production, including Laurence Olivier almost being crushed to death by a falling mass, multiple cast members becoming injured or dying over the years during the play’s many runs, and an inconvenient number of cast and crew changes in just the 1988 run alone.  So many accidents have been had that, again, infamously, the play has been regarded as bad luck, and performers must carry out a ritual if they dare even say the name in a theatre.

If you’d think, then, that theatre groups would simply stop putting Macbeth on for audiences, you’d be absolutely incorrect; for much the same reason why The Exorcist and The Crow recently got international cinematic re-releases despite their cursed status. Or because of it. Horror audiences aren’t sated by the terror being confined to the screen; we need to feel as if someone – be it ourselves or the cast and crew of the media we’re consuming – are in some form of paranormal peril.

 

“Witches... All of them witches!”

In 1968, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby took horror into a new realm of being unabashedly scary, shifting from campy prosthetics to all-out satanic imagery. Much like Macbeth before it, the occult-fearing society it was birthed into claimed that the set was cursed by witches. Regardless of the validity of these claims, the facts remain that the film’s composer suffered a fatal fall shortly after the film’s release in a way reminiscent of a character in the film’s source text, and the producer fell ill with kidney stones that had him hallucinating and yelling out lines from the film. The most tragic outcome of the ‘curse’ of Rosemary’s Baby, though, would come the following year (while the film was still in cinemas), when Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate would be brutally murdered by the Manson family. Oddly, this won’t be the last reference to the Manson family in this article – but more on this later.
Regardless of whether or not Polanski really did summon some demonic force to the set of his film, Rosemary’s Baby has enjoyed a firm place in the hearts of horror fans – namely, for the belief that there was a demonic extra hidden behind the scenes.

From this point on, many more horror films would be given the title of ‘cursed’ – deserved or not. The deaths associated with Poltergeist (1982), for example, can all be attributed to illness, non-film related tragedy, or natural cause, and yet it’s still considered one of the most famous cursed films of all time, thanks to the rumour that real human remains were used on-set.
Or was it that the set was on an ancient burial ground?
Or was that just the plot of the film?
The story gets murky, as all fakelore is wont to do.
What matters is the impact – and that is that when we see that sweet, blonde-haired, round-cheeked little girl get kidnapped by ghosts through her TV set, all we can think is “my god, she didn’t know this movie would kill her some day”.

The same can be said of The Crow, which saw the tragic death of actor Brendan Lee on-set after being shot with a projectile from a misfired prop gun. The cause of death is evident, and likely has more to do with studio corner-cutting than any metaphysical intervention; yet The Crow is still beloved in part for its aesthetic, for the tragedy, and for the lingering doubt that something beyond a simple accident may have happened that fateful day.

Interestingly, except for The Exorcist, none of these films are reported to be cursed themselves – they just come from cursed origins, and that’s enough to draw intrigue. The Exorcist, though, was, to paraphrase, cited as a “doorway for demons” and that the “power of evil” was “in the fabric of the film itself”.
As aforementioned, in 2023 it received a cinema re-release and a reboot, on top of the multiple sequels it had in the immediate years following its initial release. Audiences love a curse – and if it puts us in as much danger as the actors were allegedly faced with, even better.

 

“The circle that forever repeats itself”

We circle back, unfortunately, to the Manson family. Following the horrific murders in 1969, there was a pervasive rumour that the family had filmed their attack on Sharon Tate in a yet-unreleased tape. When this film never saw the light of day (likely due to a lack of existence), the 1976 film Snuff was created, bearing a plot strikingly similar to the real-life murder of Sharon Tate. Playing off society’s morbid intrigue into the Manson family murders, Snuff was released under the pretence of being a recreation of the real tape; though no real evidence of this recording was ever discovered, Snuff put the idea in audience’s heads that they could get close to horror in a new, macabre way, opening the door to a new type of movie. No longer were audiences satisfied by the idea that someone had been killed onset – they wanted to see someone killed on screen.
Or at least – they wanted to be made to feel like they were.

Enter Faces of Death (1978). (Almost) entirely fictitious despite its claims, Faces of Death showcases multiple scenes of gory, yet (almost) entirely fake footage of people really dying – including a famous scene of monkey brains being smashed open and eaten, and a murderer being executed in an electric chair. Playing on audience’s newly-found draw to ‘real’ examples of the macabre, Faces of Death contains only a few examples of real footage, and these are largely just of the end-result of crime scenes. The fictitious nature of the film can be evidenced if a viewer stops to think about it for even a moment – but many still herald this as a real snuff film through, I hypothesise, mainly wilful suspension of belief. There’s something disappointing and relieving in equal measure about learning that you didn’t just watch a man falling off a cliff to his death: you’re glad nobody got hurt, but a small part of you wishes they had, just so you could see it and curb the ever-gnawing horror-fan hunger for the visceral.

Following in the footsteps of Snuff and Faces of Death came pioneers of the ‘found footage’ genre. Infamous titles like V/H/S (2012), The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980) played into horror fans’ yearning to feel as if they’d stumbled upon something truly horrible – that they were watching something that they weren’t supposed to, a front-row seat to real-life misfortune. The latter of these two examples did this flawlessly, with the director of Cannibal Holocaust even receiving a (later waived) murder charge for his visceral depiction of violence. Snuff movies and cursed films play on the same chord in the human psyche; if horror fans can placate themselves with the whispered refrain “it’s not real, it’s not real”, then removing that safety blanket creates something even more delightfully grotesque.

 

“Before you die, you see … the ring”

From (debatably) real cursed movie sets, to faux-snuff films, the natural progression of cursed media has devolved into media about cursed media.
The fact is, as thrilling and fear-inducing as it once was, the concept of ‘found footage’ or ‘cursed footage’  media has become something of a cliché. With Paranormal Activity (2007) launching found footage into the limelight of the mainstream, and The Conjuring (2013) now claiming to have on-set ghostly attacks, the concept of a ‘real’ cursed movie has been either overdone, or done so unconvincingly, audiences are less likely to fall for the marketing ploy. The solution? Cursed film films: movies that depict cursed media, but that do not claim that the media you are watching is the cursed movie. In the paraphrased words of Tenacious D: this is not the most haunted film in the world, this is just a tribute.

Films like Sinister (2012), The Ring (1998), All Hallows’ Eve (2013), and Truth or Dare (2018) have all tried their hand at the ‘not-cursed cursed movie move’ trope, with varying success. Especially in the case of The Ring and All Hallows’ Eve, the audience may not feel the same thrill of danger they did when believing they were watching actual haunted, cursed, or macabre media – but the break of the forth wall is unsettling, and to feel as if the danger that just befell the characters onscreen might be able to see you through the comfort of your TV is enough to make us, just for a moment, feel that shiver of terror that comes along with cursed media. Just before the credits roll on Truth or Dare, and you realise you have, allegedly, been unwittingly pulled into ‘the game’ just by watching the film, it’s undeniable that there is a fleeting ‘what if’ moment that, although easily laughed off, is reminiscent of the uncanny feeling that The Exorcist is going to welcome demons and misfortune into your home.

 

Undeniably, horror media generally benefits from receiving ‘cursed’ status – be that organic through tragedy on-set, or manufactured. In the eyes of horror audiences, whether a film is really cursed or not is less relevant than how easy it is to suspend disbelief. To avid viewers of horror who may find themselves somewhat desensitised, the cursed film does what a good haunted house does – it removes the barrier between ‘safe’ and ‘danger’, and gives you that pitfall feeling in the stomach you got when you watched your first-ever horror movie. In short – cursed media has revolutionised and resurrected the horror genre.