“Apocalypse Now” (1979)
In the same way, Colonel Kurtz slowly descended into madness, and so did Francis Ford Coppola slowly fell into insanity when he made the Vietnam horror “Apocalypse Now”.
The movie had been already delayed and way above the budget when Typhoon Olga ruined the sets. In fact, production designer Dean Tavoularis recalls how he watched the raindrop “until everything was white outside” and the trees started to “bend at a 45-degree angle”.
Production had a lot of troubles, such as the ongoing civil war that tore the Philippines apart at the time.
Also, Dennis Hopper was known to have gone mad, as he was demanding co*aine before he would shoot every one of his scenes, and Martin Sheen had a near-fatal heart attack on set and had to struggle for a quarter of a mile just to find someone to help him. He returned on set only a month later.
“The Conqueror” (1956)
The makers of John Wayne’s “Genghis Khan” biopic thought at first that the negative reviews were the worst possible thing that might happen about this movie, but this was the least of them.
The movie was shot in Utah, 137 miles downwind of an above-ground nuclear test site in Nevada. Over time, MOST of the film’s cast and crew showed signs of cancer, which were all linked to the fact that the movie was shot in the proximity of radiation.
The director, Dick Powell, died of cancer only seven years later. Wayne and co-stars Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorhead also died of cancer. Even more, 91 of all the people that were once on set developed cancer, out of which 46 died.
“The Omen” (1976)
You can call it a curse, but apparently, working on the set of “The Omen” brought nothing but bad luck. The cast and crew had been through THREE SEPARATE lightning strikes mid-flight.
You thought that was all? Oh, no! There’s more: the hotel where the producers were was bombed by the IRA, alongside a restaurant the cast had to visit.
Also, a tiger handler from the movie died during filming, and a plane that was planned to be used on set was rescheduled as a commercial airliner and crashed, and everyone that was on board died.
But the spookiest thing of all was that special effects consultant John Richardson, who was in a car crash that killed his assistant, saw a road sign that said: “Ommen, 66.6k”, on Friday the 13th.
