An Anglo-Irish Convert in "the City"

Can films be cursed; are there Hollywood hexes?

Sunday Herald

Curse Of The Omen ... and other Hollywood Hexes

From The Omen to The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby there are tales of fatal accidents, devil worship, doomed planes and car crashes … Barry Didcock looks at some of the most cursed films of all time and finds a Poltergeist-style gumbo of death, disaster and hard-to-explain events. Is this a trail of satanic hexes, or do we just want to believe?

late night, an empty road, a car. A man and a woman speed towards a head-on collision which will kill one of them and burn an unforgettable image into the mind of the other.

It sounds like the pitch for a movie but, while film is at the heart of it, this story is very real indeed. The place is Holland, the year 1976, the date August 13 – a Friday, as bad luck would have it. The man is designer John Richardson, currently working on Richard Attenborough’s second world war epic, A Bridge Too Far, but most recently employed as special effects consultant on supernatural chiller The Omen. The woman is Liz Moore, his assistant. In a few moments she’ll be dead, cut in half when the car’s front wheel slices through the chassis and into the passenger seat. Richardson will survive to tell the tale – and quite a story it is too.

Less than a year earlier, he had masterminded the parade of gruesome deaths which had made The Omen a box office smash, among them the decapitation of a photographer played by David Warner. And, like everyone else who had worked on the film – including stars Gregory Peck and Lee Remick – he was well aware of the whispers and rumours which had surrounded its filming. There had been talk of a hex, a curse, a hoodoo.

Did he believe it? Not then, perhaps. But as he came to in the minutes after the crash, he saw something that must have chilled him to the bone: his passenger, dead from injuries which bore an uncanny resemblance to the ones he had prepared for Warner. And a road sign marking the distance to an otherwise insignificant Dutch town. It read: Ommen, 66.6 km.

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posted by Dr. Denice Hanley, DPM, M.Div. @ 6:08 AM