Cursed Films Director Jay Cheel Details Diving Into the World of Troubled Horror Film Productions

Film Selection

ComicBook.com: When people think of "cursed films," the one that jumps to most horror fans' minds is Poltergeist. What was the process of selecting the other films in the first season?

Jay Cheel: For selecting the films, we had a long list of potentials and I think we just narrowed it down to, for lack of a better word, a "greatest hits" of all of the stories that people have shared about these productions. It feels like these are the five that I would see popping up pretty regularly and it felt like they were diverse enough to line them all up and not feel like the stories were repeating themselves. They all shared something unique. So the choice of shaving it down to those five, I think, was pretty easy in terms of discovering material. There was obviously a lot of stuff that we ended up cutting from the show, but I think the challenge was just that so much of the material is out there.

There's a lot of Internet listicles and YouTube videos that have shared a lot of these legends before, so we tried to figure out a way to talk about these stories that doesn't just feel like we're repeating everything that's been said before, just with a slightly bigger budget. I wanted to make something that felt a little more substantial than that and maybe elevated beyond just the idea of, "Here's the top five most cursed horror film productions," and then just bullet-pointing them. There were some things that hit the cutting room floor, but I think we covered the majority of the main claims connected to the films.

Ambitious Explorations

The Poltergeist episode is the closest to "bullet-pointing" all of the claims about the series, while another episode explores the world of exorcists and another breaks down how "curses" actually function. Were these angles that you always aimed to explore or were those threads discovered while developing each episode?

It's hard because with documentaries, you plan for what you hope to get and then some opportunities arise while in production that you have to decide if you're going to follow them or not. The Exorcist episode, there's a whole Paul Bateson section, which we did find in the research, but we were in the field when we were being connected to Barton Lane, who was the man who's in that sequence performing the medical procedure. So we had to follow that in the moment, while we were actually traveling. Sometimes those decisions are made in the field, but I think it was just a matter of, some of the films, the cursed stories connected to them, are deeper for some movies than others.

It's funny you mentioned the Poltergeist one, because I think that's one of the strongest, because so many of the claims made in terms of that film being cursed in some ways mirror things that happened in the film itself, which we acknowledge in the episode. And I think that gives the curse a little bit more of an interesting meta power that we can explore. Whereas a film like The Exorcist, where it's a lot of people dying, but a lot of them are older people, so it's not that unusual, just a lot of coincidences. But a lot of things ultimately came down to just, almost like labor practices on set, like [director] William Friedkin just being William Friedkin with his aggressive tactics and how that affected the people who made the film.

For me, the most interesting aspect of all of that is the effect on Linda Blair and how she left that production, having this great, life-changing experience, but ultimately, she had to have bodyguards hired, and this film changed the view of her in the public eye. She was this young girl who people looked at as the devil. So you see something like that and that feels a lot more thematically rich, and seems to say a lot more about the lingering legacy of the film. When you talk about curses, that feels to me a little bit like a curse that she carries with her. Even though that film brought her great success, it also brought her a lot of trouble. And the way in which she's dealing with it now, she's come full circle and is running this dog sanctuary, taking care of pit bulls.

It just felt like a very poetic angle to take. Of course, we did the real-life exorcisms in that episode. The intent with that was always to be, this is also the legacy of the film, how people might not have even heard of the idea of exorcism without the popularity of the film, The Exorcist, and how that's affected their personal paths. Overall, I think it's just a matter of trying to ... I'm a horror film fan, but I'm a documentary filmmaker, so I'm trying to look for angles that are a little bit deeper than just bullet-pointing things that happened on sets.

Unexpected Discoveries

At one point, a topic comes up that Linda Blair doesn't want to talk about, while The Crow episode featured a number of emotional remembrances of Brandon Lee. Were there any reveals of information in the interviews that you were really surprised by? Or were there especially powerful emotional encounters that you're proud to have captured?

I think Craig Reardon would be one, he was the makeup effects person who used the skeletons on Poltergeist, simply because he, at first, was not interested in taking part. His initial email, he threatened to sue me personally if we even mentioned his name, so I emailed him back and just laid out what exactly we were trying to do with the show, and he was really into it. Being able to give him a chance to be completely honest about his feelings about how people have built this story behind the use of these skeletons, I think was something that I was happy to do for him, and I think he was a great interview.

And Michael Berryman I think was great in The Crow episode, like an unexpected, very emotional and empathetic and passionate speaker and very articulate.

Richard Sawyer from The Twilight Zone episode, who speaks about the accident that happened on that set in a very raw and honest way that felt almost like he had been wanting to get that off of his shoulders for quite some time. That was definitely a pretty deep interview, as well.

There were a number of people, I think, in this show that I was very happy to engage with and give them the chance to speak honestly about this subject without some agenda where we're trying to push a supernatural angle like, "Can you make it feel more scary? Or can we just pretend like you believe that what happened on set was supernatural?" Being able to let them talk honestly was great.

Twilight Zone Backlash

The response I saw to the series was largely positive, though you and the series definitely earned some backlash with The Twilight Zone episode and its inclusion of footage of the deaths of Vic Morrow, Renee Shinn Chen, and Myca Dinh Le. Some viewers thought it was exploitative and some wished there had been a disclaimer about the graphic footage. Not that you have to offer a statement on the matter, as the episode itself is largely your statement on the issue, but can you talk about those discussions regarding the inclusion of the footage and if a disclaimer was ever considered?

In terms of a disclaimer, that's certainly not something I'm thinking about while making the episode, because that's just outside of my, I guess, zone of control. In terms of including the footage, it's something we definitely talked about and thought long and hard about. My whole thing with the season was just to use the tone of the interview subjects to guide the tone of the episodes. If you look at The Omen episode, it's a little more playful because Richard Donner and Mace Neufeld talk about the curse in a more playful fashion.

It just felt like, in the end, that Richard Sawyer's interview just felt like it led us to that decision, just how affected he was by what happened. And the fact that, for the arc of the season, this idea that these cursed stories, part of the reason why they have this power is because they've happened on these film sets and are stories that have been told over time without any supporting evidence other than just the word-of-mouth perpetuation of these creepy little coincidences. But when you actually have a visual reference to one of these horrible tragedies, I think it completely changes how you engage with it. I think that there was evidence of that, of, like you said, how some of the reaction to that footage, how people reacted to it, which is a completely, I would imagine, natural reaction.

The only thing that I think was misunderstood was this idea that it felt like we were giving some exclusive access to this footage. This was something that was aired, at the time during the trial, on the nightly news. I had clips of the news airing that footage in its entirety, and there were multiple angles of that accident, and we went with the one that was the furthest away and the least graphic. It was definitely something we thought long and hard about and ultimately decided that the inclusion of it was guided by the level of emotion that Richard Sawyer provided to us through his interview, but it's not a choice that everyone will agree with, so that's completely understandable.

Personally, I thought the footage was disturbing, but it served as a reminder that "three people died while filming" was much more horrifying than an entry on the movie's IMDb trivia page and that actual lives were lost due to the irresponsible filming conditions.

Yeah, that's the difference. We're making a documentary. We're not just making a YouTube visual essay where we're counting down the top five most cursed films.

Season Two

I know that a second season was only just recently announced, but is there anything about the upcoming episodes that you can tease?

The only thing I can say is what was in the release, unfortunately, because Shudder doesn't want episodes released yet or revealed yet, but we're very excited by the fact that it's a very diverse collection of films and some of them will be surprising for people, I think. It's going to take us outside of North America, so we'll be doing some traveling, so there'll be more of an international perspective. And a couple of them, I could say are a little horror adjacent, similar to what The Crow was. So, unfortunately, that's all I can say.

I'm hoping it's a good collection that some people will see a couple in there that they love and are excited about it, and then maybe there might be one or two, where it's like, "Oh, I wonder what that's about." And it might introduce them to something.

I can read between the lines. They are "cursed" and diverse so you're going to cover Wes Craven's Cursed starring Christina Ricci. Say no more.

You got it.

*****

Cursed Films Season One is now available on Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD, and streaming on Shudder.