Creepy Mysteries From Movie Sets You Wouldn’t Expect
You hear stories all the time about eerie events on the sets of horror movies: Everyone who starred in Poltergeist died, Regan’s bedroom was spared from a fire that burned down the rest of The Exorcist’s set, I Know Who Killed Me murdered Lindsay Lohan’s career, etc. But unexplained mysteries have occurred on the sets of movies you’d never expect, too.
Dumb and Dumber
Did you get any eerie vibes from the luxury hotel where Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels end up in Dumb and Dumber? You might have — it was the Stanley Hotel, where Stephen King was staying when he wrote The Shining. For fun, Carrey requested to stay in King’s infamous room, number 217, but he left in a panic after three hours. It would be a pretty funny prank if he’d claimed to have seen the blow-job bear or something, but he’s refused to talk about it for 30 years. That’s a man legitimately afraid of the blow-job bear.
The Conqueror
The Conqueror, a 1956 epic about Genghis Khan starring John Wayne, is just as awful as it sounds. Imagine dying for that piece of shit. But that’s what nearly a quarter of the cast and crew did after about half of them developed cancer within 25 years of wrapping the film. The blame is largely placed on the nuclear testing site upwind of where the movie was filmed, but it’s just as likely to be karmic retribution for casting John Wayne as Genghis Khan.
The Passion of the Christ
As the poet hath said, lightning strikes, maybe once, maybe twice, but on the set of The Passion of the Christ, it struck three times. One bolt struck star Jim Caviezel as he delivered Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and then five minutes later, assistant director Jan Michelini was struck. Another time, both were struck when Caviezel stood under Michelini’s umbrella, which wasn’t as desirable in this case as the song makes it sound. At a certain point, it’s hard not to interpret that as God saying, “Fuck this film in particular.”
Jaws
Stephen King’s son, Joe Hill, has written since 2015 about his belief that a then-unidentified murder victim known as the Lady of the Dunes appeared as an extra in Jaws just before she was killed. The woman spotted by Hill bears a striking resemblance to sketches of the victim and wears clothing very similar to those she was found with, and Jaws was filmed just miles from where she was found on Cape Cod. “What if the young murder victim no one has ever been able to identify has been seen by hundreds of millions of people in a beloved summer classic and they didn’t even know they were looking at her?” he wrote.
She’s since been identified as Ruth Marie Terry, and no one has come forward to say she didn’t work on Jaws, or “Hey, that was me, I’m not dead.”
Return to Babylon
The idea for Return to Babylon, an all-star slapstick retelling of Old Hollywood scandals filmed in the style of an Old Hollywood silent film, came to director Alex Monty Canawati after he found 19 rolls of film lying abandoned on Hollywood Boulevard, almost like fate. When he played back what he’d filmed frame by frame, however, he noticed that the actors’ faces often morphed briefly into monstrous masks. According to Canawati, experts who examined the film couldn’t find any reason for the ghostly impressions. Whether it’s the stars of Old Hollywood reaching out from beyond the grave or just shaky camerawork, this definitely wouldn’t have happened if Canawati decided to make a superhero movie.
