The Poltergeist series has long been rumored to be cursed, reportedly due to the fact that real human skeletons were used in a scene from the original film. Since then, five actors who were involved with the franchise have died, some under circumstances that sound straight out of a horror movie. Take Dominique Dunne, who played Dana Freeling in the first entry, for example. Five months after Poltergeist premiered in 1982, Dunne was strangled by her ex-boyfriend, John Thomas Sweeney, outside of her West Hollywood home; she never regained consciousness.
Then there’s Julian Beck, best known to Poltergeist II fans for portraying Reverend Henry Kane. Beck died from cancer eight months before the 1986 sequel hit theaters. His co-star, Will Sampson—a real-life shaman hired to play one in the movie—followed suit in 1987, a result of post-operative kidney failure (he’d just undergone a heart and lung transplant). Sampson also apparently felt the need to perform an exorcism on the set of the film at one point.
Why People Believe the ‘Poltergeist’ Movies Are Cursed
Heather O’Rourke (Carol Anne in the original trilogy), like Beck, didn’t live to see the release of her final entry in the series: 1988’s Poltergeist III. O’Rourke began exhibiting flu-like symptoms in January of that year and went into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital. She later died from septic shock caused by congenital stenosis of the lower intestine, which doctors at the time called “distinctly unusual” because she lacked prior symptoms. O’Rourke was only 12 years old.
Lastly, we have Lou Perryman, a character actor who had a small role as Pugsley the construction worker in Poltergeist. On April 1, 2009, Perryman was murdered in his home by a man he’d met a little while earlier. Seth Christopher Tatum, who’d recently stopped taking his prescribed medication, had attacked his mother’s ex-boyfriend and fled to Perryman’s neighborhood. Shortly after striking up a conversation with Perryman, Tatum entered Perryman’s house and repeatedly struck him with an axe.
However, one person who isn’t buying the whole curse angle is Robbie Freeling himself, Oliver Robins. In 2022, Robins told Yahoo Entertainment, “I do believe in the paranormal to some degree, but I don’t think there’s a curse because those deaths can be explained.” He went on to say, “You had these tragedies happen, but they were going to happen whether [the actors] were in the movie or not. Like with Heather, she had a medical condition for which she wasn’t treated. So I don’t think they are interconnected.”
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