38: Cursed Movies: The Wizard Of Oz and The Exorcist
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In 2018, I had the opportunity to work on the movie Annabelle Comes Home.

Not in like any sort of important capacity, but I did get to go to set quite a bit. If you haven't seen it, the movie takes place in the Warrens' house on a night that the haunted Annabelle doll escapes from her glass case. Almost all of the movie takes place in a house that was built on a soundstage on the Warner Brothers lot. Side note, if you're ever watching that movie and you get scared, don't watch it.

Just know I'm on the other side of the set eating M&Ms and taking selfies with the Annabelle doll when she wasn't being used.

On the first day of production, as lights were being set up and actors were just coming to set, the first AD called everyone over to one of the rooms. We all crowded together shoulder to shoulder amongst the replica artifacts in the Warrens' collection. A monkey with symbols, a music box, a wedding dress on a mannequin. All objects that represented the cursed objects the real Warrens kept in their Connecticut home.

And as we're in there, a priest walks in. At first, I assumed he was just an actor and a priest caller, but one of the producers stepped forward to introduce him. He was a real Jesuit priest, and he had come to bless the set. As you can imagine, I was really confused. ♪

We all bowed our heads and the priest led us through a quick prayer and splashed holy water around the set. Small droplets of water hit the monkey, the music box, the dress. Afterwards, I asked one of the producers what just happened. And I was not expecting his response. He told me that we were dealing with subject matter that some people take extremely seriously. Demons, the devil, curses,

and that there had been a history of movies, like ours, that had a series of horrible things happen on them. Some even said that those movies were cursed. So we had a priest come by and bless the set. Think of it like insurance that nothing goes wrong.

That led me down a deep rabbit hole of movies people have claimed were cursed. And I'll say, whether or not you believe in curses, you can't deny that there have been movies where a lot of horrible things have happened and had lasting consequences.

In this episode, I want to share some of what I found with you. I want to start with The Wizard of Oz, which, though not demonic, is a movie that many people point to as being cursed. But then, I want to talk about The Exorcist, the movie that inspired other movies to bring priests to bless the set. It's a movie that deals with the devil himself.

People thought that even screening the movie in theaters would invite the devil out. As always, listener discretion is advised. It's that feeling. When the energy in the room shifts. When the air gets sucked out of a moment and everything starts to feel wrong. It's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's seeing. It's when your heart starts pounding. It's when your heart starts pounding.

Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. This is a podcast for people who love to follow their dark curiosity wherever it leads them.

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I was just checking out the dark and spooky history of Marfa, Texas, like the hotel James Dean stayed at while filming his last ever movie, Giant. And I documented some of that on the show's socials. Okay, there's a lot to cover today, so let's get into it. I remember the first time I watched The Wizard of Oz as a kid. There's just something about it where, even though it was released in 1939, it's timeless.

It's the story of a girl who's fed up with the frustrations of home and goes on a great technicolor adventure with creatures that don't exist in our world. She takes down the two main villains, though one accidentally, learns the wizard is a sham, and none of this jades her. She keeps her sense of wonder the entire time, and in the end, she learns that there really was no place like home.

It's a story that every age can relate to. And as a kid, I was so entranced by the world, the wonder of the film. But it wasn't long until I started hearing about the darkness that lurks within the movie, mostly from the actual production of it. First, it was at sleepovers. You know, there's a munchkin who hung himself in the original version. My friends, always the ones with older siblings, would tell me,

No matter how many times I watched the film, though, I could never see it. Maybe it was just an older copy where that scene accidentally slipped in, somehow visible to second graders, but not to the director who spent hundreds of hours rewatching the film.

I want to look at what's fact and what's fiction when it comes to The Wizard of Oz. A movie people have claimed is the most cursed movie of all time because of the sheer number of incidents that occurred while making the film. And I also want to look at the long-term effects of them. So the costumes are one of the best parts of The Wizard of Oz, but they also proved to be the most accident-prone.

Nearly everyone in the main cast, save Dorothy, is in a costume that covers their arms and legs. The lion and scarecrow are covered in padding and thick cloth, and the Tin Man has an almost full-body coat of armor on. The costumes look fun and almost makeshift in the movie.

But it takes on a new meaning when you learn that the temperature on set would get up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 38 Celsius, during shooting. The set was so big that the director, Victor Fleming, had crew gather as many unused lights in Hollywood as they could to light it. This led to temperatures on set becoming overwhelming. Some crew members would pass out and be carried off set.

It got so bad that they had a fire marshal nearby at all times to monitor the temperature so the background didn't catch fire. Occasionally, when the fire marshal ruled that it was about to go up in flames, they were ordered to turn off all the lights and open up the doors to the soundstage they were filming on. The actors would sprint outside to gasp for air and dry their sweat.

Burt Lahr, the actor who played the lion, would try to take his suit off in between shots to cool down. And other actors remembered seeing that all of his clothes underneath would be completely soaked in sweat. Burt's makeup man once remarked that Burt would come to set and look himself in the mirror for 10 or 15 minutes before he would sit in his makeup chair, just trying to pump himself up for the process he hated so much.

Putting on his costume took almost two hours every day and left only his cheeks and eyes exposed. Every other square inch of his body was covered by costume or prosthetics. Once the prosthetics were on his face, he could only consume food and drink through a straw. So on top of enduring sweltering heat all day, his lunch was usually a hot blended soup.

But the lion costume wasn't the only thing that caused trouble on the set. You may have heard about what happened to the original Tin Man, Buddy Ebsen. Buddy was originally cast as the Scarecrow, a role that was then given to actor Ray Bolger when Ray decided he didn't want to play the Tin Man. So Buddy was recast as the Tin Man. The role required the actor to wear a tin suit with any remaining skin being painted silver.

To achieve this coloration, production would paint Buddy's skin white and then dust the white paint with powdered aluminum. At first, it seemed like this was achieving the desired look with no consequences. But then, on set, Buddy's hands and feet started cramping. Soon, his arms and legs were cramping so badly, he was having trouble standing up.

Eventually, he felt like he couldn't breathe and was rushed to the hospital with pneumonia. The doctor told him that his lungs were coated in the aluminum particle dust that he had been breathing in while they painted him. His lungs were permanently scarred, and for the rest of his life, he would suffer from bouts of bronchitis. So, I guess you could say that the curse of the movie followed him later in life.

Buddy was replaced by actor Jack Haley, and now the aluminum particles were first blended into the white paint and then painted onto his body. Jack confessed later that he too had trouble breathing as the Tin Man, but he wasn't suffering from the same cramping as Buddy, so he had to just continue on.

The ability to carry on throughout production seems to be a theme, though there were some people who probably should have been stopped. One day, an actor playing one of the Munchkins, Charles Kelly, brought two loaded guns to set. According to him, he felt that the actor playing the mayor of Munchkinland, Charlie Becker, was eyeing his wife and he wanted to tell him to back off.

Charles Kelly was disarmed by production and told not to bring guns to work anymore, but he was allowed to keep working. As for his wife and the mayor, he was right. The two eventually got married.

So join me in the

Margaret Hamilton, the woman who played the Wicked Witch of the West, seemed to be particularly cursed during film's production. But Margaret almost wasn't the witch. The original casting notice for the witch role described her as a beautiful witch, like Glinda.

Margaret saw that casting call and thought, couldn't be me. Shortly afterwards, another casting notice was released describing the witch as ugly, and Margaret snatched her keys right up and ran to the casting session. I would never describe Margaret Hamilton as ugly. Instead, I would say that she had a specific look that lends itself to character acting.

Prosthetics were added to Margaret's face to make the role even scarier, and thick green paint containing copper was slathered over every inch of her not covered by her black dress. Because of this terrifying look, Margaret had to spend the rest of her life rehabilitating her image,

She would continue to terrify children even in her civilian clothes, though she was known to everyone as being incredibly kind and gentle. Margaret made multiple appearances on Mr. Rogers later in life just to prove to children that she wasn't really a witch. Okay, so if you've seen the movie, I want you to think back to the first scene the Wicked Witch appears in. There's a moment where she's screaming at Dorothy,

Rightfully so, might I add, Dorothy just vehicular manslaughtered her sister. It's the part where she says, I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too. After she threatens Dorothy, she turns away and starts walking towards a red plume of smoke that's already started rising from the floor. It's coming from a platform that's been camouflaged into the brick.

Margaret was supposed to stand on it, it would start going down, and then a giant swell of fire would billow from the area, and the witch would be gone. In the movie, it looks seamless. The witch effortlessly disappears behind the cloud of smoke, but this was an incredibly dangerous stunt. The platform was so narrow that Margaret had to tuck her arms in tight and hold the broom perfectly vertical just to fit through it.

You would never guess it by watching the movie, but she ended up in the hospital because of this shot. The timing of the stunt was all wrong. You can see it when the smoke starts that the trap door opened too early, before Margaret was standing on it. She jumps on the platform, but it's way too late. By the time the platform brings her under the stage, the fireball has already erupted, catching Margaret in the middle of it.

Immediately, her face and hat catch fire. And remember how I said the makeup she was wearing was copper-based? The copper, being metal, started heating up in the fire, meaning that even after someone smothered her face to put the fire out, the makeup was so hot, it kept burning her.

Her face was covered in second-degree burns and still burning, so a makeup person whisked her away, brought her into a bathroom, and started scrubbing the makeup off of Margaret. To be sure that it was removed from every single pore and that they weren't going to infect the burns, the makeup team used rubbing alcohol to remove it. Other cast members remembered hearing her screams.

as the makeup was scrubbed vigorously from her face. Margaret was whisked away to the hospital so her burns could be treated. That night, when she came home, she told her son's nanny to tell him that she had a new costume she was trying out, a mummy costume, and he shouldn't be afraid when he sees mommy. Her son remembered coming into her room and seeing her bandaged all over her body, only two slits for eyes letting him know she was in there.

He could tell something was wrong, but Margaret didn't want to upset him. After a few weeks of rehabilitating, she was feeling much better and she returned to set. That first day back, the director told her that she was going to film the scene where she writes a message in the sky using her broomstick. To do this, she would have to sit on the broomstick while a small gasoline engine was started next to her legs, which would emit the black smoke.

"'Absolutely not!' Margaret shouted. She was not about to try her luck after what she just went through. Instead, her stunt double agreed to sit on the broomstick for the shot. Sound started rolling, the director called action, and in the first take, the small gasoline engine exploded into a thousand small metal shards, sending the stunt double straight to the hospital."

The history of "The Wizard of Oz" is dark, but is it cursed? Was it some supernatural force that made the fake snow out of asbestos? Or was it just a lack of understanding? Sure, some people still swear there's a ghostly image of a hanged actor in the back of a scene.

If you're not familiar, there's a scene in the movie where Dorothy, the lion, the tin man, and the scarecrow all link arms and skip away through the forest. As they turn around to skip off, in the back left of the set, you can see a blur of motion moving back and forth. Don't look it up on YouTube. The first video that pops up is doctored footage that makes it look undeniably like a person swinging back and forth.

If you look up any recent copy of the film, you can see the motion is a big exotic bird the movie rented from the LA Zoo. But some people say if you buy an original copy of the movie, you can still see the corpse swinging in the background. It's an actor who played one of the munchkins, the rumor goes. Those actors were paid pennies compared to the main cast, barely a livable wage. That part is true.

Did it drive one of them far enough to end their life on set, though? Not likely. The reason it looks like a bird now is that in the 1980s, a remastered version of the film was released, and the improved quality revealed that it was a bird in the background, not an actor. But it does make a good sleepover story.

Then there was the legacy of Judy Garland, the bright-eyed brunette Dorothy, the girl next door who grew up to struggle with addiction. She fought her demons with the arsenal she was trained to use from a young age. And historians have noted that these addiction struggles may have started on the set of The Wizard of Oz.

Judy was just 15 when she was cast, and her body started rapidly changing once production started. The studio did everything they could to maintain her girlish figure. They strapped down her chest with binders. They fed her a myriad of pills to keep her weight down.

At the time, and I talk about this in the Morbid Medicine episode, these pills were full of amphetamines. Judy would be so wired after set that she couldn't sleep. So the studio had a doctor prescribe her sleeping pills full of barbiturates. So this teen girl at the start of her career was being given speedballs by her employer.

Later in life, when Judy went on talk shows, she would tell stories that rewrote some of the history of the movie. In a 1967 interview with Jack Parr, Judy claimed the actors playing the Munchkins were drunks who had to be picked up by a butterfly net, a claim that was objectively false. Her view of set had soured over the years, and she claimed that the other actors tried to push her out of the way when they would link arms and skip.

When the lead actors heard about her accusations, it broke their hearts. They had all been Judy's champions during filming. But when I watch her on YouTube giving these late night TV anecdotes in the 1960s, I see a woman who's trying to make sense of the way her life turned out, who maybe knows that the Wizard of Oz was the root of the problem and is searching for the words to explain it. Maybe, in a way,

She does feel like the set cursed her to have a life of addiction struggles. The next movie I want to talk about deals with a curse in a different way, a much more literal way. It's a movie that showcases the devil and may have paid a price for it. The Exorcist, after the break. I'm Victoria Cash, and I want to invite you to a place called Lucky Land.

I want to take you back to 1949 in Cottage City, Maryland.

A town so small, it doesn't even cover a square mile. There, a young boy known publicly for years by only an alias, Roland Doe, is experiencing something strange. For the last month or so, there seems to be an evil following him around. It started small, knocking around his room at night, the feeling that someone was circling his bed.

But lately, when Roland lays down to sleep, his bed will move across the room. He knows Latin even though he's never studied it. It feels like someone is inside of him, taking over his body. His parents are worried, but they don't know what to do. This feels beyond their control, so they call a priest.

According to Roland, this all started when his aunt Harriet taught him how to use a Ouija board. She was a spiritualist and was interested in contacting the dead. Initially, she told him it was a game. They would play with it at night just to see what it would spell out, as if it were a crossword. But Harriet started telling Roland about other ways that spirits could communicate with him, like tapping.

Sometimes a spirit can make tapping sounds to signify something to you. Soon, the tapping noises were happening outside of their sessions when Roland and his grandmother were the only ones in the house. After hearing this story, the priest believes that Roland is possessed. The Ouija board must have brought something into the house. "Where is Harriet?" he asks.

But Harriet can't help them. She recently died unexpectedly. The priest knows this is serious, and he gets to work on exercising the demon he believes resides in the boy. An article is published in the Washington Post after the priest successfully exercises the demon from Roland. It took between 20 and 30 times, and each time Roland would throw tantrums, screaming in Latin and thrashing about.

But eventually, the boy was declared free of demons. A young college student gets his hands on the article, and he is in awe. He spends the next few decades thinking about this story incessantly. It keeps him up at night. That man was William Peter Blatty, and he would go on to write the script for the movie The Exorcist based on this very event.

So when the movie went into production, there was already all of this lore, all of the stories about a young, nameless boy in Cottage City who had been possessed by the devil. The cast and crew were reenacting a real time the devil came to Maryland, and many people felt that the darkness from the real life case had made its way into production.

Production on the movie broke ground in August of 1972, with a few changes from the original story. The biggest one being that Roland was rewritten to be Reagan, a young girl suffering from a possession, played by Linda Blair. Around the time that production started, there were a few suspicious deaths related to the cast and crew that caught the media's attention.

Linda Blair's grandfather passed away. One of the special effects experts died. Max von Sydow, who played Father Marin, lost his brother on the first day of production. Two of the actors whose characters die in the movie, Jack McGowran and Vasiliki Malieros, passed away shortly after production wrapped.

The assistant cameraman's newborn died during production. The night watchman and a crew member who watched over the set's refrigeration system also died. Many claimed these deaths were mere coincidences, though it is a high number of deaths in less than a year. I've worked on a few movie sets and no one has died during production, let alone eight people.

Then, there was how a bird flew into a circuit box early on in production, leading most of the set to catch fire. And as if that weren't enough to spook some of the crew, the only part of the set to not catch fire was Reagan's bedroom, the room the possessed girl would reside in.

It was at this point that a priest was called to do a blessing on set. Production was starting to feel a little nervous about what they were filming, and they thought it would be a good idea to shake some holy water on the whole operation. It was this blessing that inspired sets like Annabelle Comes Home to do Blessings.

After I read this part, I thought to myself, surely nothing else happened after this point. The production had already been plagued by disaster. There can't possibly be more to this. But similar to how Roland wasn't saved until multiple exorcisms, the first blessing of the set seemed to not do anything.

See, the director, William Friedkin, was known to push the actors to get what he wanted. This included emotional and physical stress to get the performances he felt were best for the film. There's a scene where Regan is thrashing around in her bed, the possession causing her body to writhe and flop about. This is an exaggeration of what happened to Roland, by the way. He was never described as moving this erratically.

To show the supernatural hold on the girl, Linda Blair was sewn to a plank that would shake and thrash wildly, allowing her to move faster and more erratically than she could on her own. However, there was one take where something went wrong. Linda became untethered from the device, and as it flung her around, her back wasn't supported.

In the scene, Linda is being whipped back and forth and back and forth by the device. A device, mind you, which was being operated by adults and may not have been calibrated correctly for a child. You can hear her screaming as she's being thrown about. And according to Linda, everyone thought she was, quote, acting up a storm.

It wasn't until they called cut and her screams continued that they realized her back had been fractured by the device. That was the take they used in the film. Ellen Burstyn, who played Reagan's mother, also suffered injuries during production. In one scene, she's thrown backwards. To achieve this, she was tied to a rope that was controlled by a stunt coordinator. He would tug the rope gently to pull her backwards.

For one take, William Friedkin pulled the coordinator aside and told him to really go for it. After he called action, the stunt coordinator pulled Ellen back harder than he had on any other take, causing her to fall backwards and hit her head on the wall behind her. This also is the take that was used in the film.

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These are some of the events that are brought up when talking about how cursed the movie is. But was it a result of the devil's intervention? Or was it strictly human?

The deaths and the fire feel out of our control, but the actors' injuries feel completely preventable. Regardless, all of this was used as marketing fuel to show that the movie actually was cursed. And when the movie came out, audiences would faint and throw up during it, some unable to make it more than 10 minutes in. It seemed like the cursed element of the film was pushing audiences to the theater.

Some religious zealots said that even showing the movie would invite the devil into the theater. But that just made people want to go more. They wanted to be able to tell their friends that they made it all the way through the movie. The Catholic Church, however, signed off on the film because they thought it was a good representation of the evil that exists in our world. Perhaps they also saw this as good marketing for them. Like, look at what the power of the Lord can save you from.

There was one thing that wasn't brought up at the time as proof of the curse, and that's because no one realized it until years after the film. But there is a murderer in the movie. There's a scene where Reagan's mother takes her to a hospital to have some brain scans done, hoping that they'll get some answers. In the scene, two x-ray technicians attend to Reagan.

And these are real x-ray technicians, not actors. When William Friedkin was casting the film, he really did go to Tisch Hospital in New York to find a real hospital and real staff to use in the film. One of those men is Paul Bateson. He's soft-spoken and gentle in the film. He even makes a small joke to Reagan to make sure she's comfortable. But on September 22nd, 1977...

Reporter Arthur Bell gets a call from a stranger. He sounds soft-spoken and gentle on the phone. And though Bell didn't know it at the time, it's Paul Bateson. I killed Addison. The voice on the other end says...

Arthur had been looking into the death of Addison Verrill, a film reporter for Variety. Addison had recently been added to a long list of unsolved murders of gay men in Greenwich Village. He was found dead in his apartment on the morning of September 14th, 1977. Who is this? Arthur inquired. I can't tell you. I'm gay and I needed money and I'm an alcoholic, but I'm no psychopath.

The caller went on to confess that he had met Addison at a gay bar earlier in the evening and went back with him to his apartment, but he felt like Addison didn't like him enough. He was looking for a long-term partner and Addison clearly wasn't. So around 8:00 AM the next morning, after a night of drinking and doing various drugs, he hit Addison over the head with a frying pan and stuck a knife in his chest.

But the caller said some things that piqued Bell's interest. He said things like, "I'd like to atone, but I don't want to give myself up. I wouldn't be able to practice again. I'd lose my license." So Bell got the feeling that whoever was calling him worked in medicine. The police were quickly able to connect the phone call to Bateson, and he was arrested and sentenced to 24 years in prison.

You may see on the internet people claiming that he was a serial killer, but every legitimate source I read said that he only committed this one. Later in his life, however, William Friedkin visited him in prison, and he told Friedkin that there was another body, someone he dismembered and put into trash bags. That person, though, was never found, and no other murders were tied to Bateson.

His whereabouts are now currently unknown, but an obituary for him has not been posted, meaning he's possibly still out there. So, does any of this mean that the set of The Exorcist was cursed? What do you believe? Was the movie really cursed or was it a series of unlucky coincidences that led people to believe that? To answer that, maybe we look at the case that inspired the movie.

The real identity of Roland Doe was recently revealed after he passed away in 2020. His name was Ronald Edwin Hunkler, and he never identified himself after the event for fear that he would never be left in peace if people knew who he was. But Ronald's story is a happy one. He went on to live an incredibly successful, well-adjusted life after the exorcism,

He grew up to be a NASA engineer, working on the Apollo space missions of the 1960s. He died just before his 86th birthday in Maryland, close to where the devil visited him last. So whether it is the devil or just a dark history, I think of these stories often.

I personally think curses can mean a few different things. For some, a curse means being followed by a dark energy set on destroying you. But I would argue that it doesn't have to be supernatural. A modern interpretation may say that, yes, the Wizard of Oz set was cursed because it precipitated a dark cloud above Judy Garland that followed her throughout her whole life.

Or, yes, the Exorcist movie was cursed because of the lasting effects that were born on set. Or, I don't know, maybe it is something ancient that's really been here before all of us, lurking in the earth and waiting to rear its ugly head if we make the wrong move. Regardless, I would rather have the priest on set just in case.

This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kaylin Moore. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Shout out to our new patrons who will be thanked in the monthly newsletter, which you can sign up for on our website.

Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart-pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstartspounding.com. Until next time, stay curious. Ooh!

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