Bizarre Things That Happened On The Set Of Poltergeist

A collaborative effort between blockbuster filmmaker Steven Spielberg and horror provocateur Tobe Hooper, "Poltergeist" was an instant summer hit when it was released in June of 1982. Like any good Spielberg production, it had humor and heart aplenty, and like any good Hooper film, it scared the bejeezus out of audiences everywhere.

The movie was so successful MGM churned out two sequels, a TV show, and a 2015 remake. There's nothing like the original, though, and almost 40 years after its release, the film is still just as beloved as ever. In fact, when Rolling Stone conducted a reader's poll of the top horror movies of all time, "Poltergeist" cracked the top 10, along with staples like "The Shining," "The Exorcist," and "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre." It's safe to say the film is a crucial part of not just horror movie history, but movie history itself. But getting from conception to classic was no easy task.

Production confusion, creepy accidents, and eerie coincidences were all among the everyday realities of the film's creation. On top of that, what happened on the film's set ended up giving rise to one of Hollywood's most enduring conspiracy theories and one of its most legendary alleged curses. So, to give you a good idea of just how unusual the production of "Poltergeist" was, let's look at some of the bizarre things that happened during filming.

Stop and ponder the film for a minute, and you'll likely think of just a handful of elements from it that are quintessentially, overwhelmingly "Poltergeist." Zelda Rubinstein's fearless medium Tangina is likely one of those elements, which makes it hard to believe she was only on the set filming for six days out of the 12-week shooting schedule.

She nailed the part, of course, and as she told Ain't It Cool News, everything she shot made it into the film. You could say she was just perfect for the role — and a part of that may have been due to Rubinstein's own belief in the supernatural. The actress didn't shy away from questions about the unknown, and even claimed in an interview on CNN's "People Now" to have "had incidents in my life that were quite rare, having prior knowledge about things that would occur."

Rubinstein added that "we all have that ability, but it's usually such a frightening, disruptive sensation, that you don't go with it. You turn it off." When asked if it affected whether she accepted the role, she made it clear she would have accepted it no matter what. She did, however, feel "that it added a certain extra touch. That I'm not fearful about phenomena that we don't understand."

If that doesn't sound like Tangina, we don't know what does.

Though Steven Spielberg ended up sharing writing duties with Michael Grais and Mark Victor, he originally wanted to work with Stephen King. Both Spielberg and King were hugely popular and immensely successful at this point, though the author hadn't really broken into the movie business himself just yet. Only two of his books had been turned into movies — "Carrie" and "The Shining" — while "Salem's Lot" had been adapted as a TV mini-series. Interestingly enough, Tobe Hooper had directed that mini-series.

The idea seemed perfect — too perfect to ever work. When the two Steves spoke to EW in 2018, they were both enthusiastic about their almost-collaboration that, unfortunately, never happened because of a communication breakdown. Spielberg had to get the script done fast, and when he tried reaching out to King, the author was "on a ship going across the Atlantic to En­gland." With no internet, no cell phones, and no way to get in touch in time, Spielberg had to move on and tap two other writers to help him.

It's hard to say how different the film would have been, but we can bet everything from the film's tone to the stories from the set would have been vastly changed had King been involved in the creation of "Poltergeist." We might have even gotten a cameo from the Master of Horror himself.

Yes, the clown really did choke Robins during filming. But it wasn't the part that we're all likely thinking of, when that clown arm wrapped around the boy's neck and pulled him off the bed. The arm was pulled off of Robins' neck during filming and played back in reverse to make it look like it had wrapped around him.

Fortunately, that went off without a hitch, but it was the next few moments that proved dangerous, as that evil clown wasn't done with Robins. "What happened was that contraption got caught around my neck," the actor told the now-defunct publication Icons of Fright. And to make it worse, "I was in a tight confined space under the bed."

Fortunately, the producer was watching out for his safety. "It's almost like a car accident," Robins mused. "You know how a car accident happens so fast you don't remember, but if you don't act something is going to happen? Well, Steven saw that, probably in the video assist, and he pulled me away from it. Who knows what might have happened otherwise. It was very fast and I don't think anything would have happened, but who knows ... maybe I wouldn't be here today."

Though these days "Poltergeist" is viewed as a spooky, occasionally intense but mostly family-friendly film, it almost ended up far darker than what we got. According to The Telegraph, a number of ideas were changed to soften the film, including one scene towards the end in which Diane is grabbed on her bed and pulled around the room. It was originally supposed to explicitly presented as a ghostly sexual assault, but Hooper would later admit they toned it down in order to get a coveted PG rating (this was before the PG-13 rating would arrive to offer a middle ground between PG and R).

"Tobe would want to go harder," Grais explained to The Telegraph, "Steven would want to go softer, and they met in the middle. They complimented each other."

Of course, Hooper wasn't the only one pushing for twisted. As Grais told Rue-Morgue, he and Victor had originally planned to off Carol Anne in the first act. "[Spielberg] told us, smiling, we were sick but to proceed," the screenwriter said. Eventually, though, the producer came up with another, safer, option, and Carol Anne was just spirited away to another dimension.

Whatever else there is to say about Spielberg being on set nearly every day of filming, it's probably safe to say that without him, we would have ended up with a very different, very R-rated "Poltergeist."

While most of the film's effects were labor-intensive feats of engineering, there was one scene that was just downright magical: the kitchen chair stacking. In fact, it was so magical that Hooper would later admit it was his favorite scene to shoot.

As he explained in an interview for "Post Mortem with Mick Garris," filming those chairs was "more like a magic trick than a special effect." All it took was some quick moving and a little classic misdirection.

"There's a pre-constructed stack of chairs with two special effects men right beside the camera," the director shared. "And then there were six other effects people waiting in closets underneath the counter. So we started shooting it, and it took four seconds for everyone to pull the chairs out, run into other rooms, then two guys come on, put the assembled stack on the table, and then make a dash out the back way."

It was all done in a single, seamless take as the camera panned away to Williams, then back to the table. Of course, Hooper added, "In dailies, it sounded like a cattle stampede." But that was easy enough to fix. He just took the sound out and gave us one of the creepiest, most surprising chair stackings ever seen on film.

Perhaps the film's most enduring and unfortunate legacy is the "Poltergeist Curse." It's supposedly been the cause of a number of unfortunate accidents and tragic deaths, from O'Rourke succumbing to illness just a few months before the release of "Poltergeist III," to the murder of Dominique Dunne (who played eldest daughter Dana) just a few months after the first film's release.

The curse, for those who believe in it, originated on-set, in the final moments of the film as the dead literally began bursting out of the ground and rising from their graves. Those scenes were so effective because those skeletons looked so terrifyingly real — and that's because they were real. And just as the whole premise of the film is based around the desecration of a graveyard, when folks learned real human remains were used as props, they began to speculate that this had brought on a dark supernatural occurrence.

Craig Reardon, though, who did the special effects in the first film, made it clear to The Telegraph that there was nothing unusual about using real skeletons. The movie industry had been using them as props since Hollywood's earliest days. Unlike the developers of Cuesta Verde, they were not desecrating a graveyard, and plenty of movies have used them without incurring the wrath of the dead. Still, like "Poltergeist" itself, it does make for one hell of a story.