The cast and crew of 1976’s The Omen started having bizarre experiences before shooting was even underway. To begin with, Gregory Peck, who’d lost his son to suicide four months prior to filming the movie, flew to London to prepare for his role in September 1975, only to have his plane get struck by lightning. Planes carrying executive producer Mace Neufeld and screenwriter David Seltzer were also reportedly struck at different points. To make matters weirder, the producer of the movie, Harvey Bernhard, narrowly avoided a lightning strike of his own while on location in Rome.
As if that all wasn’t bad enough, a plane that director Richard Donner planned to use for aerial shots over London ended up crashing after running into a flock of birds. Six people were killed in the process, but that wasn’t the strangest part. The plane was said to have landed on top of a car that was parked on the runway. Sadly, inside the vehicle were the wife and children of one of the airfield’s pilots.
The Making of ‘The Omen’ Was Even More Terrifying Than the Movie Itself
That brings us to Sidney Bamford, an animal expert who worked at the Windsor Safari Park where the famous baboon scene was shot. Bamford helped out with a sequence filmed in the big cat enclosure that was cut from the final version of the movie. Unfortunately, the day production moved away from the park, Bamford was mauled to death by a tiger. The animal had evidently caught Bamford by surprise and grabbed him by the head; by the time a fellow ranger was able to intervene, it was already too late.
Perhaps the eeriest tragedy to befall someone associated with the film involved special effects coordinator John Richardson’s girlfriend, Liz Moore. Richardson, it should be noted, helped stage the unforgettable decapitation scene in the movie. Months later, while working on A Bridge Too Far in the Netherlands, the two got into a bad car accident that resulted in Moore being decapitated. Richardson recalled spotting a sign that indicated they were 66.6 kilometers away from the city of Ommen at the time.
If you add in the fact that the IRA bombings going on in London nearly cost crew members their lives on three separate occasions, it should come as no surprise that people still think The Omen was a cursed production.
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