Poltergeist: The Making and The Curse - Bonus
Haunted UK Podcast: History, Hauntings and the Unexplained
Steven Holloway
4.5 • 652 Ratings
🗓️ 27 February 2022
⏱️ 20 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A family home built over the dead.
A child’s voice coming through the television.
And behind one of the most iconic supernatural films of the 1980s, a darker story began to grow.
In this bonus episode of Haunted UK Podcast, Steve explores the making of Poltergeist — the 1982 horror classic that became a landmark in paranormal cinema — and the alleged curse that has followed the film and its sequels for decades.
The episode revisits the story of the Freeling family, the disappearance of young Carol Anne, the terrifying presence known as “the Beast”, and the now-famous revelation that the housing development was built not over a moved cemetery, but over bodies left behind beneath the ground.
Beyond the film itself, Steve looks at the unusual production history, including Steven Spielberg’s role as writer and producer, Tobe Hooper’s credited direction, and the long-running debate over who truly shaped the finished movie. The episode also explores some of the most unsettling behind-the-scenes stories: the malfunctioning clown prop that nearly strangled Oliver Robins, JoBeth Williams filming in muddy water with real human skeletons, and strange disturbances said to have taken place during production.
The darker legacy of the franchise is then examined through the tragic deaths and near-misses often linked to the so-called Poltergeist curse, including Dominique Dunne, Heather O’Rourke, Julian Beck, Will Sampson, Lou Perryman, and Richard Lawson’s survival of a fatal plane crash.
Cinematic, reflective, and rooted in horror history, this bonus episode asks why certain films seem to gather legends around them — and whether the curse of Poltergeist is simply coincidence, or something that has become part of the movie’s haunting power.
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Transcript
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| 1:04.3 | Thanks for listening and enjoy the episode. |
| 1:17.0 | On the 4th of June, 1982, the movie Poultergeist was released to both critical and commercial acclaim, earning a total of $121 million against a budget of just 10 million. |
| 1:24.8 | It was nominated for three Academy Awards, six Saturn Awards and a British |
| 1:30.0 | BAFTA amongst its many accolades. The story followed the Freeling family, who had moved |
| 1:37.1 | into a new house on a large planned development project. Stephen Freeling was a top real estate |
| 1:43.3 | developer working for the company who were building the |
| 1:45.9 | estate. His wife Diane was a stay-at-home mum who ran the house and looked after their three |
| 1:51.7 | children. Dana, 16 years old, Robbie eight years old and Carol Ann five years old. After an incident early in the movie involving Carol Ann who was watching |
| 2:04.0 | and talking to a TV with only static on screen, the paranormal events begin to rack up in both |
| 2:10.4 | intensity and terror. At first the family are entertained by the strange forces at work in their |
| 2:16.5 | home. |
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