Toward the end of 1982’s Poltergeist, Diane Freeling (as portrayed by JoBeth Williams) slips and falls into an unfinished swimming pool, where she’s greeted by the skeletal remains of the people who were buried beneath her house:
Williams didn’t learn until after she filmed that scene that those were real human skeletons she was interacting with. As the actress later found out, it’s cheaper to rent the genuine article than to make fakes.
And this wasn’t an isolated incident, either. Something similar happened with George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead a few years earlier—albeit accidentally. Makeup artist Tom Savini brought what he thought was a prop skeleton to the set and threw it into the background of a scene without a second thought. The bones were eventually sold to a store owner who discovered that they were the remains of a woman who’d been dead for at least a century.
But according to Craig Reardon, who worked on Poltergeist, it wasn’t exactly uncommon for filmmakers to intentionally utilize authentic skeletons as he did. An early example of this can be seen in the 1931 James Whale version of Frankenstein, when Fritz (Dwight Frye) is sent to steal a brain from a local university:
Oh yeah, and that goofy-looking pile of bones that pops up out of the acid vat at the end of House on Haunted Hill? Goofy-looking, sure, but very much real:
Even Mrs. Bates’s skull from Psycho was borrowed from a medical supply company. And that’s straight from the mouth of the guy who helped glue fake hair onto it: Jerry “Beaver” Mathers of Leave It to Beaver fame, of all people:
Suddenly old horror movies don’t seem so cheesy anymore, eh?
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