1. The Omen
First of all, I want to be clear I love the Omen. The soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith alone makes it a horror classic, and the film itself is certainly very suspenseful, guided by the masterful direction of Richard Donner. That being said, the accidents surrounding the film are arguably more ominous and more numerous than the ones seen in the film itself, making this one of my absolute favorite Hollywood legends. We begin with the near-misses. Gregory Peck, who played the lead in the film, on his flight from US to England, where much of the movie was shot, had his plane hit by lightning. The plane, thankfully, landed with no issues, and everyone onboard was fine. That alone is barely worth mentioning, except for the fact that executive producer Mace Neufelds plane was also struck by lightning on the same trip, but a different plane! I dont know about you, but Ive flown a lot, and my plane has never been hit by lightning. And the lightning coincidences dont stop there! Producer Harvey Bernhard was narrowly missed by a lightning bolt in Rome during the production. For those of you who have not seen the film, a priest is killed in the movie by a piece of debris loosed by bolt of lightning. We arent done with airplane mishaps, either. An airplane was chartered by the production team to shoot some b-unit footage. The company, however, offered the flight at half-price, if they would agree to move the flight to a later date. The airplane they were meant to be on crashed, killing everyone onboard. According to some reports, the aircraft also managed to hit a car on its way down, the passengers of which were the family of the ill-fated pilot. The nearly fatal accidents for members of the crew continued. Richard Donner himself was actually hit by a car, yet remarkably without serious injury. A restaurant where Neufield and Peck had dinner reservations which they didnt make was bombed by the IRA. There were also out-of-character animal attacks during the production. The Rottweilers which were featured prominently in the film turned on their trainers; and shortly after the crew left a zoo where they were filming, lions ripped apart a zookeeper who was evidently helping the crew just moments before. All of this pales in comparison to the cruel irony experienced by John Richardson, however, who was a special effect artist on the film. He created the famous decapitation effect in the film, where a backing up car looses a pain of glass, which flies out and cuts a characters head clean off, setting the fake head spinning in an almost darkly comical way. Tragically, almost a year after working on the film, he was involved in a car accident in the Netherlands, which decapitated the woman that was in the car with him. According to legend, when the special effects artist came to, he saw a sign to the town of Ommen, 66,6 km away. As a side note, during the filming of the terrible 2006 remake, days of footage were lost to camera malfunction. Despite the insistence of the support engineers that no such error exists, the remotely controlled camera kept displaying error 666. I guess the antichrist doesnt discriminate when it comes to films quality.