10 Movie Scenes That Were Incredibly Awkward On Set

6. JoBeth Williams Swam With Real Human Skeletons...And Nobody Told Her - Poltergeist

The Scene

The iconic moment where poor Diane Freeling (JoBeth Williams) slips into her muddy swimming pool and takes a soggy dip with a parade of skeletons buried underneath it.

Creepy, right? And it gets "better"...

The Awkwardness

An urban legend has persisted ever since Poltergeist's release that the production designers ended up using real skeletons, and that this is the reason for the so-called "Poltergeist curse", where several members of the production died unnatural deaths in the years following shooting.

Whatever your stance on the curse, Williams herself confirmed in more recent years that she was indeed swimming around with actual human remains, and nobody told her until later during shooting:

"You have to understand that this sequence took probably four or five days to shoot. So I was in mud and goop all day every day for like four or five days with skeletons all around me [as I was] screaming. In my innocence and naiveté, I assumed that these were not real skeletons. I assumed that they were prop skeletons made out of plastic or rubber. I found out — as did the whole crew — that they were using real skeletons, because it’s far too expensive to make fake skeletons out of rubber. And I think everybody got real creeped out by the idea of that."

Spending a working week sliding around a muddy pool is one thing, but doing so while unknowingly hanging out with a dozen real skeletons? Yikes.