- My name is Mace Neufeld.
I'm a feature and television producer,
and I was executive producer of "The Omen".
Omen came about because a friend of mine,
Harvey Bernhard, came to me with the idea of doing
a story about the devil child.
- The curse attached to The Omen is an interesting one
because it kind of almost seems self-inflicted in a way.
They had a religious advisor named Robert Munger on set,
who I think - before mostly anything had begun - had said,
if you're going to be dealing with this subject matter,
the devil, you're inviting the devil into this,
and bad things are going to happen.
- There are some people that say "The Omen" was cursed
because of the subject matter of a child...
as, um, the Antichrist.
Robert Munger, the minister who came up with the idea,
thought Satan's greatest trick is to remain invisible.
The film was trying to make him visible,
and so that's why Satan was trying to stop the film
from being made.
- In the very beginning,
when we were first setting up the process
of shooting the film in England,
Munger told us
we were treading on very thin ice;
that the Antichrist would do everything
not to have this picture made.
Um, for me that was in one ear and out the other.
In the beginning, Gregory Peck was coming to England
and his plane was struck by lightning.
That was scary.
Then, David Seltzer was coming over - the writer -
just a few days later,
and his plane was struck by lightning.
- Two planes carrying two crew members,
both being hit by lightning on the way to set
is pretty spooky.
- Also, Gregory Peck was supposed to be on a flight
that he cancelled,
and then the plan apparently crashed
and killed everyone onboard.
- The plane took off,
hit a flock of birds,
crashed at the end of the runway
and into a... a road
and hit a station wagon.
And in the station wagon
was the wife and the two children
of the pilot of that plane.
They had dropped him off.
- There were a lot of strange things happening
that you could call cursed.
The IRA at that time was, in 1975,
was very active in London.
We're staying at a hotel on Piccadilly opposite Green Park.
My wife and I were walking out of the hotel
when suddenly there was a...
massive boom.
They'd set off a bomb a block and a half away.
We were booked to go into Scott's Restaurant,
and they blew up the restaurant.
As these things began to happen,
we all became very wary.
Woman: Welcome to Windsor Safari Park.
- We shot in a place called Windsor Safari Park,
and there was a sequence with baboons.
Woman: Keep all car windows closed.
- Suddenly the car that Lee Remick was driving stalled.
She couldn't get out.
And Lee Remick is trapped in a car
being attacked by baboons.
Lee was really terrified,
and it shows in, in that scene.
We shot this at an animal park.
One of the handlers at the park was killed.
- The animal handler on the show
was eaten by a lion... allegedly.
- Lions or a lion ate the zookeeper.
- Not during the filming,
but close to the filming.
- When we left, and he was securing the place, he left...
his cabin door open or something
and the lions attacked and killed him.
- Another report said it wasn't a lion,
it was a tiger.
- After the making of the film,
our special effects supervisor,
John Richardson,
had an automobile accident.
Um...
And his fiancée...
was decapitated.
- The accident replicated a decapitation in the movie.
- People said it happened...
- Near a sign... - That said, uh, "Omen."
- Omen.
- O-M-M-E-N.
- 66.6 kilometres.
- But these things that happened
around the making of the film
seemed to be more than coincidental.
That's the best way I can put it.
- With movies that deal with demonic archetypes...
- Three sixes.
- there's definitely the potential
for all types of phenomenon.
The production for these movies,
they start to make what you would call
a substantial contact with these forces.
They start to distill them
into the atmosphere,
the production,
also into the individuals
that are involved in the production.
Those sensitive to these forces
notice the little glitches
and the matrix of things like...
consecutive plane flights
getting struck with lightning.
Absolutely, the film "The Omen"
was, was, no doubt,
an active gateway in its own right.
- I'm Michael Correll.
I'm known on the internet as Uncle Birch.
Uh, I'm a witch.
Some people think that
if you just don't believe in this kind of stuff
you can't be harmed by it.
We call those targets.
That person won't be protecting themselves.
They won't have any spiritual protection
and when everything goes wrong in their life,
they won't try and fix it.
And then it's like, yeah, it's like a virus,
like a festering virus.
It gets worse and worse and worse with time.
- Who is it?
- I went and saw "It Follows"
And, you know, the story is...
this sort of unknown evil follows you
after you've had sex.
- And get rid of it, okay?
Just sleep with someone as soon as you can.
Just pass it along.
- I mean, it's really easy to read that
as sort of a really shallow kind of a metaphor
for sexually transmitted diseases.
But on the other hand,
why get rid of the idea...
of evil as an infection vector?
Because the idea of supernatural infection
is really common.
This idea that we can have evil passed on to us
and we can somehow be tainted with it.
- Ungh!
- To talk about curses you have to define
what is a curse.
Some of the earliest curses
are found in Egyptian execration texts,
or in Mesopotamian rituals,
or in biblical texts.
Curses often come as part of what's called a covenant.
A covenant is sort of like a contract
between a superior party and an inferior party
and there are curses in these contracts.
What's gonna happen to you if you don't do it?
If you look in the Bible,
it can be animals that are cursed,
it can be people that are cursed,
it could be places that are cursed.
- Cursing was quite widespread in antiquity.
We have lots of examples
and lots of phenomena about cursing.
One of these phenomena is narratives.
So these are stories of figures like Jesus or prophets
or other holy men cursing somebody else -
striking them dead, striking them blind.
We also have tomb curses or grave curses.
- "Death... eternal punishment for...
anyone who opens this casket."
Good heavens, what a terrible curse!
- In ancient texts, curses were pronounced, so...
it was premised on the belief
that words had creative power.
Pronouncing the curse
will have an effect in the real world.
Just by speaking something,
you could make something happen.
- The occult colours mainstream life
in ways that we rarely suspect.
Lots of people in public life,
probably in the same measure as those in private life,
are interested in divination,
tarot, dream interpretation.
- We've come to have our fortunes told.
Can you really read the future?
- I will not disappoint you, my lady.
- There are people today
in different parts of the United States
and other parts of the world who will still pay somebody
to curse a troublesome neighbour
or to curse a love partner who jilted them.
- In this day and age,
witchcraft's huge,
folk magic's huge.
We got hoodoo, we got voodoo, we got Konja.
There's all kinds of different magics out there.
I've been a witch my whole life.
I talk to spirit just like I talk to you sitting here.
It's just this is normal to me.
And some people out there are just -
I will even say - are just so out there,
I can't believe it.
- Black Magician.
Yeah, absolutely, Black Magician.
You know, it's not filmmaking that I do,
and it's not necessarily just vlogging.
It's doing black magic,
performing as crazy and out-there rituals as I can.
Just kinda pushing the envelope
further and further and further,
for myself and documenting that for video.
Three, two, one, go.
Hey, guys. It's E.A. Koetting.
Is it possible for a film set
or a film production to be cursed?
From a Black Magician's standpoint,
this is a tricky question
because, for the most part,
in order for there to be an actual curse,
you have to have somebody on the other end of it
pushing that curse -
another Black Magician
that's trying to harm somebody through that curse.
For example, Satanists who might not like films
mocking their religion.
- There was some watered-down versions of Satanism.
It could be that the Satanists didn't like that portrayal.
- After spending a week searching for these people,
I finally met their leader.
As he explained his beliefs and methods,
I realized I was dealing with a maniac.
- There was a time,
especially back when those movies were coming out there,
that Satanists were concerned with some PR work.
- In the making of "The Omen",
I got a lot of crackpot threats.
One of these terrible letters I've gotten
said my blood will run on the streets
for doing what I did.
- Since we're talking about films being cursed,
we're gonna do a practical experiment
and see if we can curse a film that's in production.
It's one of the most unique feelings
to call on a destructive force and to...
let it flow through you.
The feeling that I'm left with,
whether I'm trying to kill somebody through magic
or I'm trying to destroy a business
or whatever it is,
the emotion I'm left with at the end of it
is always humility.
I'm just humbled by it.
- The premise of all curses
is that pronouncing the curse
will have an effect in the real world.
I invoke doom
for this empire,
for this creation.
- There's no one, as far as I know,
that pronounced a curse on "The Omen".
Oh.
That was a very strongly felt presence.
- The mere fact that...
a production is looking to encapsulate
and embody the essence
of many of these forces
is where it begins.
- Probably the most common magic in the whole world
and almost every culture practices
this type of magic on Earth,
and it's called sympathetic magic.
The rules of sympathetic magic are like attracts like.
And in Hollywood you're gonna know this
by the Hollywood version of the Voodoo Doll.
- Look! An authentic voodoo doll.
Somebody already sent for it.
- Get a doll and you get somebody's hair
and fingernails, maybe their picture.
Put 'em in the doll, on the doll.
And then you do the thing
that you want to have happen to the doll.
- Ready for another shot, Dad?
- And then that likeness attracts it
to the other person.
Depicting a demonic curse extremely accurately
could bring the magic of like attracts like to you.
Oh, "The Omen", just like, you know, the Antichrist.
If the devil exists, if the Antichrist exists,
that's some pretty intense energy to be depicting.
- Yeeeee-haaaaw! Hooo! - Yeee-haw!
- The nature of the film can be enough
to kind of ignite its own spark.
You have many films -
like you're talking about "City Slickers" -
that don't cross the threshold
of creating a substantial contact...
- So long, cowboy.
- ...'cause that film is spiritually neutral.
Horror does...
seem to have that knack of uh...
crossing the threshold
into darker and dangerous subject matter.
- It's almost the perfect cocktail of variables
that get people thinking about supernatural ideas
and possibilities.
When you watch a horror movie, you're watching it to escape.
Even though you know it's a movie,
you're thinking about things
that are outside of conventional thinking
or scientific understanding of the world.
People become more open-minded to,
or more interested in, supernatural ideas.
And so when you watch these movies,
it just kind of puts you in the right mindset
to wanna see patterns
or, you know, believe in conspiracies
or to believe in curses.
- With "The Omen",
what you have is a series of coincidences or incidents
then that people then weave into a narrative
about a curse.
- That's what coincidence theory is about,
just trying to get connections
between what is rational
and what is, uh, weird.
And you know, on the one hand,
rational can look weird, too.
- Our brains are designed to believe all sorts of things,
whether there are ghosts, poltergeists,
angels and demons,
and gods and aliens and conspiracies.
We have all this propensity to just see patterns everywhere,
just assume everything is connected.
Okay, we're about to show you a short clip
of three basketball players dressed in black
and three basketball players dressed in white.
Each of them is passing a basketball
back and forth between themselves.
Your task is to count the number of passes
between just the three white-shirted players.
All right, you ready?
Go!
How many of you saw the gorilla?
What? What gorilla?
Here it is again. I'll rewind it.
Oh, come on, that's a different tape, Shermer!
No, it's the same one.
So the famous gorilla experiment,
this was done by Christopher Chabris and his team
in which they were testing to what extent
people do not see things in their environment.
You know, it's like how could you miss a gorilla?
Well, 50% of subjects don't see the gorilla.
And the reason is 'cause they're attending
to counting the number of passes.
And by being focused on one thing,
you might miss something that's completely obvious,
right there in front of you.
Half.
This is interesting cognitively
because it shows how much we miss
that's right there in front of us.
Not only do we see things that are not real,
we miss things that are real.
Now we're talking about cursed horror films.
I'd like you to think about putting those films
that are cursed in a box.
And we're gonna put this box right here
and then we're gonna draw a square around it
in which we have three other boxes.
So, in this box, number one, we have cursed horror films:
"Poltergeist" and "The Crow"
and "The Exorcist" and so on.
Now what I want you to think about is...
the second box over here,
which are cursed non-horror films:
Superman, you know -
I mean, Christopher Reeves fell off a horse, broke his neck -
and Apocalypse Now -
you know, Martin Sheen has a heart attack
and all these weird things that happen.
Okay, why aren't we talking about that cell?
'Cause they're not horror films.
In this box down here,
I want you to think about non-cursed horror films
like "The Shining".
- Come and play with us, Danny.
- This is one of the scariest films ever made.
No curses.
Or, more recently, "It"
or "Get Out."
Why don't we notice those?
And then the fourth category of course, is...
non-cursed, non-horror films.
Pick any of them: "Citizen Kane", "Casablanca"...
You know, people had long careers after that.
Nothing weird happened.
So you have to keep in mind all four categories
and remind yourself, look, I'm only focusing on this one,
but all the other ones put it into context.
And when you see the bigger picture you realize, okay,
there's actually nothing to be explained.
- Seeing patterns in the world, that's how we form meaning,
that's how we learn to exist.
And that can extend to seeing patterns
where there aren't patterns.
Maybe it's a significant coincidence.
Maybe it was a message sent to me from somewhere.
There's the case of Mark Chapman,
the guy who killed John Lennon.
So he was outside John Lennon's apartment in New York City,
wondering if he should actually go through with it.
And just at that moment, Mia Farrow walked by
and she starred in Rosemary's Baby.
And then he recognized that the building,
is called The Dakota.
It was used in the filming of Rosemary's Baby,
which was directed by Roman Polanski,
whose wife, Sharon Tate,
was murdered by the Manson family.
And they were a fan of the Beatles' song,
Helter Skelter,
and, of course, John Lennon is in the Beatles.
And he took this as a sign
that he should go through with it
and kill John Lennon.
- Horror films tend to, in a bizarre way,
mirror real life.
- What're they doing? Why do they come here?
- It's a kind of instinct,
memory, what they used to do.
- The mirror of real life is that we are frightened
of things that could go wrong in the world.
It's the same reason we love coincidence stories.
We love coincidence stories because it gives us a feeling
that the world is smaller than it is.
- Yeah, see that word's kind of a problem for us.
We don't... witches uh...
we just don't believe in coincidence.
There's action and there's reaction.
There's something happened that caused that to happen,
and some things are weird and hard to explain.
- There's a saying that the greatest trick
the devil ever played
was to get people to not believe that he exists.
And I have a hard time with that one as well
because it's to the devil's advantage to be known.
Whether we're talking about angels or demons or gods,
the one thing that they want is attention.
- It's exciting to me to actually to think
that the devil is a film fan.
I don't want to like put my head into the logic of a devil,
but just squeeze the heart
if you wanna kill somebody.
I don't know, maybe the devil is a real artist
and likes the poetry of some of these things.
But even then, if the devil was an artist,
and I'm not saying he isn't,
uh, I think he would go - or she -
would go to great pains to really drive it home,
like be killed by a kid.
Because if you really wanna do a curse on "The Omen",
you dress a kid in a little Angus Young prep-boy uniform
and have that kid show up at the door, ring the bell,
and then just look at you funny and then your head explodes.
Oh, the devil's here.
- If Satan wants to stop a project,
if he wants to bring a plane down,
he's gonna bring a plane down.
Actually, it seems like Satan is helping the film.
Every time there's a big mishap,
the IRA explosions, for example,
it was the crew that was safe and other people that died.
So how is it that Satan is trying to stop the film
and he keeps killing other people?
- To me, this is the opposite of a curse.
This is a blessing.
If it was cursed, wouldn't Gregory Peck
have been on that flight?
- But maybe we're looking at this all wrong.
Maybe these films aren't cursed by the devil.
Maybe these films have been blessed by the devil.
Perhaps the devil has been at work all along.
When demons work in this world,
they like to sign their signature, their autograph,
on everything that they touch
so that those of us who are paying attention
can look and can see the very clear signature
of the powers of magic
and the powers of darkness in the world around us.
- No, actually...
actually, I think it was a blessed film production.
Certainly, as far as I was concerned.
- No, I think it's just the opposite.
I think it was a very blessed film.
- In the end, it all worked out.
We were a big hit and uh... everybody got through it.
- I do think that these movies
and the stories that sometimes sprout up around them
confirm people's senses, rightly or wrongly,
that we don't understand everything in life.
The Edwardian builders of the Titanic
who boasted that they built an unsinkable ship
didn't have it all figured out.
Victor Frankenstein didn't have it all figured out
when he thought he could unlock the key to life.
But I'm not for a moment suggesting
that anybody should throw rationalism out the window.
- And it's obvious why the devil would be doing this.
This is the age of the Antichrist.
The devils have been let loose upon the world.
And they want to make sure
that we know that they are among us.