10 Horror Movies That Were Scarier For Making You Think They Were Real
6. Poltergeist
To be clear, Tobe Hooper's 1982 horror masterpiece Poltergeist is not a found footage film or a mockumentary, but an actual piece of typical narrative horror filmmaking.
And so, while nobody believed that they were watching something truly real, the story surrounding Poltergeist's production has nevertheless made it the most believably "cursed" horror film.
The curse is largely centered on the unexpected deaths of two young actors from the original movie in the years that followed.
22-year-old Dominique Dunne (who played the Freelings' daughter Dana) was strangled to death by her ex-boyfriend mere months after the film's release, and 12-year-old Heather O'Rourke (who played Carol Anne in all three films) died of a bowel obstruction several months before Poltergeist III's premiere.
The urban legend surrounding the curse only grew in more recent years when it was revealed that the crew used real skeletons for the sequence in which Diane Freeling (JoBeth Williams) is dragged into the family's swimming pool and encounters the skeletons of the bodies buried underneath it.
While conventional logic of the world around us says these happenings were nothing more than spooky coincidence, that doesn't stop many fans still believing the curse to be true.
Whether you believe it or not, it nevertheless adds another ominous layer to a movie already overflowing with existential dread.