Yet, not all on-set incidents arise from poor safety protocols or negligence. On several horror movie sets, cast and crew members have encountered baffling occurrences, with mysterious issues repeatedly surfacing that defy logical explanation. It’s understandable that people might become superstitious when working on a horror film, leading many to speculate that paranormal forces might be at play.

Of course, rumors of cursed sets could serve as a clever marketing ploy, something to spice up interviews. If the goal is to frighten audiences with the film, revealing that the actors themselves were frightened during filming could heighten interest. However, in some instances, we’re dealing with real tragedies—events that would be in extremely poor taste to exploit for promotional purposes. Whether these incidents are due to scientific reasons or something otherworldly, these horror movie productions have gained a reputation for being cursed.

Linda Blair’s performance in “The Exorcist” stands as one of the most iconic in horror film history. Remarkably, she was just a child when she delivered this Oscar-nominated portrayal of the possessed Regan. The demands of the role were immense, requiring her to curse, scream, cry, blaspheme, eject green goo, levitate, and more. In a memorable scene where Regan’s body is violently contorted, a mechanical bed was used to create the effect. Unfortunately, this apparatus malfunctioned, resulting in a serious back injury for the young actress.

In “The Exorcist,” Linda Blair gave one of the best horror movie performances of all time. She was also just a child at the time, which makes her Oscar-nominated performance all the more impressive. The William Friedkin film asked a lot of her in her role as the possessed Regan. She had to curse, cry, scream, blaspheme, vomit green goo, levitate, and more. In one classic scene, Regan thrashes up and down, bent at the waist. It was accomplished with a mechanical bed that lifted her and slammed her back down, and the setpiece malfunctioned, breaking the young actor’s back.

“I had a lot of difficulty living with the aftermath of ‘The Exorcist,’” Blair later said, via USA Today. “The back injury was far more serious than I ever imagined and really affected my health negatively for a long time.” She was later injured again on a different film set, and she ultimately developed scoliosis.

That might just be a case of a malfunctioning prop, but it wasn’t the only real and terrifying injury on the set of “The Exorcist.” A carpenter chopped off a thumb, an electrician lost a toe, and Blair’s co-star Ellen Burstyn was injured, too, in yet another paranormal stunt gone wrong. Several cast members and family members also died off-set. Friedkin ultimately had Father Thomas Bermingham, a technical advisor for the film, bless the set. Friedkin later told American Hauntings, “Nothing else happened on the set after the blessing, but around that time, there was a fire in the Jesuit residence set in Georgetown.”

“The Omen” is about a diplomatic family who lose a child and then adopt another, unaware that there’s something very, very wrong with the infant. As he grows up and begins to display quite a nasty little personality, ominous events pile up around their stately British manor. The Thorns (Gregory Peck and Lee Remick) ultimately come to suspect that little Damien (Harvey Stephens) might not just be a mean little boy; he might be the Antichrist himself.

Numerous bizarre things happened on the set of “The Omen,” making the cast and crew suspect that they, too, were being visited by ominous portents of doom. Both Peck and executive producer Mace Neufeld had their planes struck by lightning as they headed to set. Neufeld recalled the incident in a special called “The Curse of The Omen,” explaining, “It was the roughest five minutes I’ve ever had on a commercial airline … It was very, very scary.” There were also incidents involving vicious animal attacks, including the infamous baboon scene; Remick was reportedly genuinely terrified of the animals.

The legend of a “curse” likely developed because strange things didn’t only happen while “The Omen” was being shot. Special effects artist John Richardson was later in a car crash that decapitated his passenger, much like an accident decapitates someone in the film. Furthermore, Richardson later claimed he saw a sign after the crash reading, “Ommen, 66.6 km.” Can you hear that iconic theme music kicking in?

Director Tobe Hooper terrified audiences with “Poltergeist,” his Steven Spielberg-penned film about a family finding out they live in a horrifying haunted house. In an eerie mirror of the film’s motif involving static reaching out of the television, the film’s shocks didn’t stay on screen. After “Poltergeist” finished filming, numerous members of the cast met unfortunate, early, and often violent ends.

The whole cast is great, but if there’s one standout from the film, it’s Heather O’Rourke. The tiny blonde tot gives one of the creepiest performances of all time, made extra-strange just because she seems so sweet. She starred as Carol Anne, the Freeling family’s youngest daughter; after befriending the spirits who show up in the television static, Carol Anne is taken away. O’Rourke was taken too soon, too; she was only 12 when she died of a congenital bowel obstruction that led to septic shock.

Meanwhile, Dominique Dunne, who played Carol Anne’s sister Dana, was killed shortly after the film’s release; she was only 22. Julian Beck, who played Kane in “Poltergeist II: The Other Side,” died shortly after that movie; so, too, did star Will Sampson. “They’re here,” Carol Anne eerily announced in “Poltergeist.” Now, they’re gone. Unfortunately, the tragic real-life story of the cast of “Poltergeist” only helped cement its status as one of the most cursed films of all time.

“Rosemary’s Baby” is a great film, but it feels cursed in retrospect because it was made by Roman Polanski, who is now one of the most controversial directors of all time. Several years after the film’s release, he was charged with sexually assaulting a minor, and he later pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. He fled to France, where he’s remained a fugitive from U.S. justice ever since… while continuing to make films.

The classic 1968 horror film was cursed for other reasons, too; numerous people involved met severe misfortune after it was released. Composer Krzysztof Komeda reportedly fell off a cliff while celebrating the movie’s release; he never regained consciousness and died the next year. That same year, 1969, producer William Castle was hospitalized with severe kidney stones. According to Vanity Fair, he was overcome with hallucinations, seemingly believing himself to be living out the plot of the film. “Rosemary, for God’s sake, drop the knife!” he reportedly screamed in the hospital. His career never again came close to the highs of “Rosemary’s Baby.”

Also in 1969, before Polanski became one of Hollywood’s highest-profile wanted men, his pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered by members of the Manson Family. Polanski was out of town at the time, and he wrote in his autobiography that he’d been struck with a terrible knowledge when he said goodbye to Tate for the last time. He wrote that he remembered thinking, “You will never see her again.”

When director James Wan released “The Conjuring” in 2013, he likely had no idea that its success would lead to some of the highest-grossing horror movies of all time. “The Conjuring” franchise is huge, but when that first movie came out, it was just a classic chiller, a haunted-house story the likes of which hadn’t been seen in a while.

In fact, it wasn’t just a story about a haunted house. Star Vera Farmiga reportedly had experiences that point to the set itself being plagued by paranormal activity. While shooting “The Conjuring,” Farmiga found herself waking up between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. for no particular reason. Wan told Collider that he believed Farmiga’s account, insisting, “I don’t want to make up fake stuff, but it has been really weird some of the stuff that I have been hearing … In the movie, there’s a very specific period where the witch character died in that timeframe.”

Actor Joey King, too, experienced strange things on set. Though she didn’t do her own stunts, she wound up covered in bruises that she couldn’t explain, said Patrick Wilson, who played Ed Warren. Wilson told The Independent that he kept the anecdote to himself during the first film’s press tour, explaining, “I’m a parent and I wouldn’t just make light of someone. I saw the fear on her face. You literally see this little girl going, ‘I don’t know.’”

Plenty of horror movies draw their scares from Catholicism, but fewer deal with demons from the Jewish tradition. In 2012, “The Possession” aimed to fill that gap. The film is about a “dybbuk box,” inspired by a real-life object that supposedly contains an evil spirit. The movie is about a father who accidentally unleashes the spirit, endangering his daughters.

The father was played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who told Gizmodo he’s a “skeptic.” As he learned more about the box, however, Morgan came to believe that there was no good reason to risk its purported effects. “I like being a skeptic, I didn’t want to get scared. It might have freaked me out a little bit too much to be honest,” he told the outlet. “Somebody wanted to bring the box to the set, the real box. I was adamantly against it.”

Director Ole Bornedal added another anecdote to Morgan’s strange experience. He told Entertainment Weekly in 2012, “Some really weird things happened. I’ve never stood underneath a neon light before that wasn’t lit, that all of a sudden exploded.” That wasn’t all. “The worst thing was, five days after we wrapped the movie, all the props burned,” he said. “This storage house in Vancouver burned down to the ground, and the fire department does not know the cause.”

Back in the 2000s, before Ryan Reynolds was the kind of entrepreneur who would buy a phone company and a soccer club, he starred in a remake of the classic film “The Amityville Horror.” The original 1979 movie told the supposedly true story of the Lutz family, played by Margot Kidder and James Brolin. The family moves into a house on Long Island in which some horrific murders took place the year before, and the family patriarch comes unglued as he fears he may be destined to re-enact the same horrific slayings. Reynolds played George Lutz in the remake, acting out more or less the same descent into madness that Brolin had portrayed before him.

It’s fitting, then, that — much like the original movie — the remake was plagued with stories of strange things happening on set. While the 1979 film’s spooky occurrences mostly involved something falling near Brolin while he read the script, the 2005 remake had an actual body count. Kathy Lutz, the real-life mother of the family on whom the story was based, died during the first week of filming. Later, while prepping a pivotal scene involving a boathouse on a lake, the crew discovered a real-life corpse.

“We certainly didn’t treat the situation cavalierly,” Reynolds told RadioFree.com. “But this was a densely populated lake area as well. I mean, it wasn’t like a secluded pond, and this mafia member floated up or something.”

“The Conjuring” ultimately led to a whole constellation of spinoff films, including, at the time of writing, two movies in “The Nun” franchise and three that center around Annabelle, a haunted doll. Considering the creepy stories from the set of the first film, it’s only natural that the spinoffs, too, would try to cash in on some of that buzz. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, director John Leonetti claimed that his set, too, was haunted. He told the outlet that while they were preparing one of the locations, they found three distinct markings that made them think something supernatural was going on. “It was a full moon, and there were three fingers drawn through the dust along the window, and our demon has three fingers and three talons,” he marveled. “It was sick.”

The paranormal activity didn’t stop there. The first day they had an actor playing the demon in full makeup, there was an on-set accident that mirrored something in the script. According to producer Peter Safran, “…all of a sudden the entire glass light fixture falls down on his head, the janitor’s head. And in the script the demon kills the janitor in that hallway. It was totally freaky.”

If you believe in this sort of thing, it’s probably worth mentioning that the strange stories aren’t limited to the fictional doll. In 2025, a ghost hunter died in eerie circumstances while traveling with the real-life Annabelle doll. Another sequel idea?

Thanks to director Ti West’s knockout Mia Goth-starring post-pandemic slasher trilogy — which included “X,” “Pearl,” and “MaXXXine” — he’s now one of the biggest names in contemporary horror. West has been around for quite a while, though. In 2011, he wrote and directed “The Innkeepers,” a film about two people who work at what seems to be a haunted inn. Claire (Sara Paxton) loves ghosts, while Luke (Pat Healy) even runs a website about all of the strange things they’ve seen while working there.

In yet another case of reality mirroring a horror film, the cast actually lived at the hotel where they shot the movie. Paxton told CinemaBlend that it was a genuinely spooky place to film. “The vibe was creepy because it was just so old,” she said. “And in the middle of the night my door would just violently fly open. Not even do like ‘errrr’ [imitating door creaking open], it would just be like ‘doosh’ [imitating door slamming open].”

Lest you think the strange scenario was the result of a director trying to help his lead actor feel the atmosphere, Paxton claimed that West, too, experienced odd things around the hotel. “The lights would flicker on and off, the phones would ring and then nobody would be there,” she said. “And the calls would have to go through the front desk, but nobody was there.”

Wes Craven’s “New Nightmare” is one of the best films in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. It’s a meta-sequel, imagining Freddy Krueger escaping the fictional world of his films and entering real life. Instead of terrorizing original final girl Nancy, in other words, Krueger chases after the franchise’s original star Heather Langenkamp, playing herself.

Perhaps “New Nightmare” was inspired by Craven’s experience on the set of “The Serpent and the Rainbow,” an early entry in his extensive filmography. That movie was about an anthropologist named Dennis (Bill Pullman) who runs afoul of a voodoo curse while visiting Haiti… and, to hear the director of the film tell it, they too were cursed. On a 2002 special called “Masters of Horror,” Craven recalled an odd incident involving the film’s screenwriter, Richard Maxwell.

While researching the culture behind the film’s horror, Maxwell told a voodoo practitioner that he wanted to be “indoctrinated” into the practice. “The guy, who was a very sly character, said, ‘Well, then you will be!’ Somehow, he must have dosed Richard in that visit,” Craven said. “Richard came back and just basically went mad in the course of a week. He locked himself into his room; he stopped wearing clothes.” On the morning that film shooting began, Maxwell was overcome with paranoia and was flown back to the United States, according to Craven. Supposedly, when he woke up back in Los Angeles, his last memory was of the voodoo priest.