Niagara filmmaker delves into horror movie curses
Niagara filmmaker Jay Cheel loves horror movies. He also loves urban legends. He gets to indulge in both for a new documentary series coming to streaming service Shudder.
“Cursed Films” will be a fiveepisode series examining the myths and mysteries around iconic horror films like “The Omen” and “The Exorcist.” When some of these were made, there were mishaps and deaths which rattle the cast, directors and producers to this day.
“In many cases, the subject matter is very sensitive,” says Cheel, who lives in Thorold. “There’s people who actually died. That was a challenge in conducting the interviews … finding a way to tell some of these stories in a respectful manner.
“I don’t necessarily believe these films were cursed, but there’s some crazy stories surrounding them.”
An “Exorcist” set caught fire, and two cast members died during post production. Prominent stars in “Twilight Zone: The Movie” and “The Crow” also died.
“The Omen” may be the most cursed of all, plagued with lightning strikes, plane crashes, and the suicide of star Gregory Peck’s son just before filming. But the film’s most famous curse revolves around its most iconic scene, in which photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) is beheaded by a sheet of glass. Soon after the film’s release, special effects consultant John Richardson was in a car crash in the Netherlands which cut his assistant, Liz Moore, in half. Richardson claims he opened his eyes after the crash to see a marker showing the distance to a Dutch town that read ‘Ommen, 66.6 km.’
But Cheel doesn’t take the curses at face value. Much like he did for his short film “Twisted” – about the urban legend surrounding a Niagara drive-in showing “Twister” when an actual twister hit – he peels back the layers until something resembling the truth emerges.
“We get into how we look for these patterns, and why patternseeking is so important for us as humans,” he says. “What kind of feelings result for us pointing to a supernatural cause as being more easy to swallow than the randomness of the universe?”
Cheel’s documentaries include 2011’s “Beauty Day,” about Niagara Cable 10 legend Cap’N Video, and 2016’s “How to Build a Time Machine,” which followed two men with divergent views on time travel.
Shudder is a premium horror streaming service owned by AMC Networks. Cheel expects the series to debut in late spring or summer. “It touches on a lot of the things I’m interested in,” he says. “After ‘Twisted,’ it’s kind of in the same zone of these urban legends surrounding cinema.”