195. Cursed Horror Movies: The Omen and Nosferatu

Welcome back to another episode of Heart Size Pounding. As always, I'm your host, Kayla Moore. So people always ask me if I think any horror movies are actually cursed. And while sometimes I do think that they just say that for marketing purposes, there are actually a couple of horror movies that I think have some very strange and possibly evil energy associated with them. I want to tell you about two of them today. The Omen, the movie where producers were warned that the devil would try to shut down production and the original Nosferatu, where the director died under very strange and supernatural circumstances. And also, if you want more spooky stories, we just covered haunted university stories over on Patreon. Here about a dorm fire that led to a haunting, an old medical building that's now a dorm where students feel their toes being tagged at night as if their corpses, and a fraternity hazing event that still haunts a school. It's over on our Patreon and also on Apple Podcast subscriptions, as well as many other bonus episodes that you can binge during the spooky season. Alright, let's get into it. The Omen started with a simple premise. What if the Antichrist, the son of the devil, had already come to Earth and was walking among us, but no one recognized him, because he had taken the form of a child. Producer Harvey Bernhard was so struck by this thought that as soon as he heard the pitch, he stood up in the middle of the meeting, excused himself, and immediately drove home to flesh out this idea. In the wake of blockbusters like Rosemary's Baby and the Exorcist, Bernhard felt certain that he had a major hit on his hands, but he might have gotten more than he bargained for a lot more. It's been said that the greatest trick the devil ever played was to make you think he doesn't exist. And Bernhard's movie idea was a direct assault on that strategy, and several people warned him that the devil will try to stop this movie from ever being made. And they might have been right at first, but only in an ironic way. The script sat in development hell for a few years before it was picked up by 20th Century Fox and turn around, and there were more script revisions the title changed a couple times from the Antichrist to the birthmark, and then finally the Omen. If you haven't seen the movie, I'll give you a quick summary, spoiler warning, obviously. So we meet Robert Thorn and his wife, Catherine, on what should be the happiest day of their life. The day that their son is born. Sadly, the doctor tells Robert that the baby died after only one breath, but they can still have a family, because there's another baby in the hospital whose own mother died in childbirth, and they can adopt him. Robert agrees, but he keeps this truth from his wife, presenting the baby as their own, and they name him Damien. Everything seems okay at first. But as Damien grows up, unexplained things start happening in the Thorn household. The boy seems to have a strange effect on animals. They're terrified of him, except for this pack of wrought wilders that keep appearing outside of the Thorn's house. In the famous scene at Damien's 5th birthday party, his nanny hangs herself from a second story window in front of all the guests, proclaiming, "It's all for you, Damien." There's another scene when the Thorns arrive at a cathedral to attend a family wedding, and Damien freaks out, attacking Catherine as soon as they're inside of the church. More bodies keep piling up around Damien, a priest who tries to warn Robert that Damien is actually the Antichrist is impaled by a falling steeple, a photographer who tries to help Robert investigate the mystery is beheaded by a pain of glass, and Catherine suffers a miscarriage after accidentally falling over the second floor railing, an accident that may or may not have been engineered by Damien. And Robert learns that if Damien is the Antichrist, he'll bear the mark of the devil, and one night while he's asleep, Robert looks for any sign, and he finds a birthmark on his scalp, hidden beneath his hair in the shape of 6666. And with this confirmation, he knows what he has to do, kill his own son. Okay, so I'm not going to fully spoil it for you guys, so I'll stop there, especially because the real point of today's episode is what was happening behind those scenes. After sitting on the shelf for almost two years, once the Omen was picked up by 20th, their production rapidly fell into place. Gregory Peck signed on to play Robert Thorn, opposite Lee Remick as Catherine. Production was slated to start in London in the fall of 1975, if everyone made it there in one piece. But three different people had a rough time even getting to London for shooting. Gregory Peck's flight was plagued with heavy turbulence almost the entire way, and his plane was struck by lightning. Three days later, writer David Seltzer flew the same route with the same airline, and his plane was struck by lightning too. And then it happened a third time during producer Mace Newfield's trip. Now, it's not unheard of for planes to be struck by lightning, but this cluster of lightning strikes is definitely strange. Also, one night during production prep, producer Harvey Burnhard and director Richard Donner were working late. Afterwards, Burnhard offered to drive him home, and he parked on the street in front of Donner's house. It was dark, and Donner's house was on the curve of a hillside. Seconds after Donner stepped out and closed the door, he was caught in the glare of headlights. Another car came corigning down the hill out of nowhere and slammed into them, pinning Donner between the two. He managed to walk away from the accident, but just barely, a few inches difference, and according to Donner, he would have lost a leg. But was it just an accident? A crazy Los Angeles driver on a windy road? Well, Burnhard kept going back to what he had been warned about, that the devil will try to stop this movie from being made. Robert Munger worked as a spiritual advisor on the movie. Before he flew to London, he had lunch with a friend, a fellow theologian. After Munger excitedly told him about the production, his friend got really quiet. He thought the whole thing was a bad idea, because it was tempting the devil. Now, Munger shrugged. He said his faith had nothing to do with the devil. To him, Christianity was about his belief in God and his relationship with Jesus. And this was just a movie. But his friend shook his head and said, "You may not believe it now, but if you go ahead with this movie, before you are done, you'll believe the devil exists." One production started in October of 1975, multiple people commented on a strange atmosphere surrounding the set. It was like this tension that hung in the air, a sense of dread and discomfort that you just couldn't really put your finger on. And it seems like even the animals that were on set felt it too. Now the film features rotwilers and a couple scenes, in one scene, Robert and his friend played by David Warner, are attacked and chased out of a cemetery by a wild pack of these rotwilers. But on the day of the shoot, the dogs just wouldn't do anything. Instead of chasing the actors around, the dog sat patiently on the hillside, perfectly behaved, almost as if they were in a trance. To get the shots they needed, the actors had to hide slabs of meat under their clothes, just to get any reaction from the dogs. The whole thing was basically a joke on set. For the final shots, Peck and Warner were replaced by their stunt doubles. Terry Walsh, who played Warner's double, was an experienced stuntman. He had performed stunts using dogs before, and he had really, really, really prepped this scene before shooting. But when he walked onto the set, that palpable tension returned, the strange atmosphere that was always buzzing in the background. And as soon as the director called action, one of the dogs turned on Walsh and his entire demeanor changed. That trance had been broken. The dog lunged at the stuntman, attacking him so viciously that he actually bit through the protective padding he was wearing and basically mauled him. And as Walsh was sent to the hospital, the rest of the crew was left pretty shaken up. It felt like it was more than just an accident. Like maybe something had made the dog's snap. Now I do personally feel like animals' consense energy that we just can't. And the dogs were not the only animals on set that were having these strange issues. So in the movie, Catherine takes Damien to a drive-through Safari Park outside of London. It's one of the early hints that something is wrong with the little boy. As they move from exhibit to exhibit, the animals grow increasingly wary of him like they can smell something wrong with the boy. It all culminates in the baboon enclosure. The entire pack of monkeys swarms Catherine's car, leaping onto the hood, pounding on the windows, and it's truly one of the scariest scenes in the entire movie. And for Lee Remick, who played Catherine, the terror was genuine. To get the reaction that they needed from those baboons, the crew had to do stuff to provoke them. The only problem was that the baboons were completely desensitized to humans. They were in this big open enclosure where cars would just drive around day in and day out, and they just didn't really care about that stuff anymore. So they came up with a plan B. If they separated the alpha baboon from the pack, the rest of the pack might get riled up. So the on-site veterinarians sedated the leader and held him in the back seat of the car. Director Richard Donner shot with a handheld camera in the back seat with Lee and Harvey, who played Damien in the front, and when the rest of the baboons saw their leader being driven away in that car, they panicked, and they started swarming, just like the director wanted. Unfortunately, Lee Remick didn't know how to drive stick shift very well, and as the baboons swarmed in full force, she got so flustered she kept stalling the car, and as she struggled to flee through that sea of baboons, she got so flustered that she kept stalling the car. The alpha started to wake up and realizing what was happening, he grabbed a hold of her hair from the back seat and he just refused to let go. Somehow she eventually managed to get the car in gear and drive away safely, but Donna confirmed that most of her screams in the final cut were 100% real. So that's a horrible experience, but it doesn't sound like a curse. If anything, the director probably thought it was a blessing because he got the performance he wanted out of the actress. But there was another incident at the Safari Park that day that hints at a darker hand at work. So Donna had also shot a sequence in the lion enclosure, though the scene ended up on the cutting room floor. After they were done filming what they needed, the crew moved on to a different part of the park, traffic resumed and the guards and the handlers went back to work. But apparently, when one of the guards went back to his booth, the door didn't close all the way, and he didn't notice that it silently swung all the way open. Now remember, this was not a normal zoo. The animals were kept in a big open habitat enclosure. The next time the guard looked up, there were two lions standing in the doorway and before he could call for help, they attacked him and mulled him to death. But again, maybe that's just an accident, right? Again, it's horrible, but ultimately not a curse. Except some people noted that that's exactly what the omen, the film, is filled with. These tragic occurrences that have plausible explanations, but they're also so horrible that it makes you stop and wonder if something darker is at play. The circumstances of the lion attack would have fit seamlessly into the world of the film, so was it really just an accident. As the weeks of production marched on, the atmosphere, onset, turned a lot darker. One of the actors started to feel like there was a genuine presence of evil, and that it was starting to follow them home. So Gregory Peck had a favorite restaurant in London, it was called Scots. He went there practically every night after filming wrapped and even had a standing reservation. One night, after a very long shooting day, Peck decided he was gonna sit out that night's meal at Scots, but one of the producers, Mace Newfield, offered to keep the table and just go in his place. He figured he'd just walk from his hotel because it was barely a 10 minute walk away, and it was a well lit walk, and there was a view of the park the whole time, so it was a nice walk to take, when he was just a block away from the restaurant. He realized that there were fewer cars on the street than usual. It was still early though, not even 8 o'clock, but he was alone on the sidewalk, and he could hear his footsteps echoing. And then, when he turned the corner, it sounds like a joke, but the restaurant literally blew up. Broken glass littered the sidewalk, and the entire area in front of Scots had been cordoned off by the police. There was a gaping hole where the front window used to be, splintered tables and chairs piled up on the pavement. Scots was actually the latest victim of the IRA's bombing attacks, and Mace Newfield had missed it by just a few moments. At least one person died in the blast, but it wasn't the only near miss that happened during production. Several weeks earlier, the same IRA cell had bombed the Green Park Underground Station. Newfield and a couple other crew members had been walking towards the station that night around 9 p.m. when all of a sudden they heard that blast. They had avoided it by just a few minutes. Now so far in the span of production, Newfield's lane was hit by lightning, and two locations he was heading to blew up on his way there. It's starting to feel a little more than just a coincidence. As the filming continued, the subtle sense of disquiet remained on set, so the cast and crew were probably grateful whenever they had a day away from the studio so they could escape the tension and the dread of set, like this one day. Director Richard Donner and a small crew are at a private airstrip outside of London. They've chartered a small plane for some exterior shots, simple stuff like Gregory Peck getting off of the plane, him talking to another character who meets him on the runway. Before they arrived, the charter company offered production a deal. Because they only needed to film the plane on the ground, the company asked if they could charter out the plane to actual customers who would take off after they were done shooting. Basically the paying passengers would cover most of the cost, and production could get the shots they needed at just a fraction of the price. Compared with Gregory Peck as the lead actor, the Omen wasn't a big budget movie, so any chance to save money was very welcome. They agreed to the deal and they adjusted their shooting schedule accordingly. Production arrived at the airstrip in the morning, setting up their shots and they started rolling. It was a simple day, maybe a couple of hours to capture the different angles and then an early wrap. The crew finished packing their gear just as the actual passengers arrived, and by the time the plane was ready for takeoff, all of the elements of production were long gone. But perhaps one piece of it lingered. That hint of darkness that they had all felt for weeks now. The plane, squared up at the end of the runway, the pilot made confirmation with the radio of tower, all clear for takeoff, he throttled the engines, gathered speed advancing down the runway, the wind lifted the little craft into the air, climbing higher and higher, but as they made their ascent, the plane flew directly into a flock of birds. The engine seized, sputtered, and then died completely. Only moments after takeoff, the plane plummeted back towards the ground, crashing at the end of the runway and killing everyone on board. And with nothing in the way to stop the plane, it barreled through the fence at the end of the runway and onto the road, slamming into a passing car, crushing it, and killing all three passengers. And in an even cooler twist, the woman driving the car was the pilot's wife, and their two children had been riding on the back seat. This one horrible accident had claimed the lives of an entire family. And with that, the woman started to feel like it actually might be cursed. This episode is brought to you by Kachava. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you've heard me talk about Kachava a bunch, so you can trust me when I tell you that this new salted caramel flavor they just came out with is delicious. There is something about salty and sweet together that kind of short circuits my brain in the best way. I love drinking a decadent Kachava in the afternoon, something like their coffee flavor or now their salted caramel flavor. Sometimes I'll throw a shot of espresso in it as well and drink it like a coffee. Sometimes I'll drink it in the morning and just add oat milk, maybe some banana, some peanut butter. Their new salted caramel flavor has that rich buttery caramel with a hint of salt, and it still has everything that I love about Kachava, like plant-based protein, fiber greens, and so much more. There's no artificial flavors, colors, or sweeteners, no fillers, just whole body nutrition that genuinely tastes like a treat. Embrace your salty side, go to kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order. That's kachava, k-a-c-h-a-v-a.com, code HSP. Throughout the films, several of the characters and Damien's orbit suffer their own accidental deaths and injuries. Richard Donner was deliberate in how he wanted these to play out in the movie. He wanted each one to be directly on the line between plausible and supernatural. Even when it felt like Damien was the source of the violence, there was always a plausible alternative explanation, and to make all of these accidents feel as realistic as possible, Donner had this amazing cohort of seasoned special effects designers and stuntmen. Now near the end of the film, after Catherine learns the truth about Damien, she's attacked by Damien's nanny and protector Mrs. Baylock. She launches Catherine through the window of her hospital room where she falls to her death, crashing through the roof of a parked ambulance. To capture that on film, Donner turned to a stunt man named Alph joint, who specialized in high falls. He once jumped 430 feet into a waterfall for a stunt, so a jump from a two story window was hardly anything for him. And he was supposed to jump off the roof of a building and land on this airbag they had set up on the ground, something that he had done dozens of times. But just as Alph got ready to leap, he felt someone push him from behind. Making him lose his balance, and he fell instead of jumping, missing the airbag completely and slamming into the ground. He did manage to somehow survive this fall, but he refused to call it an accident. He insisted that something pushed him off of that roof. But there was no one there who would have done it, people watched him fall and they confirmed that there was no push. It was as if that horrible presence they had all been feeling had pushed them. The curse was getting stronger, but no one could have imagined what was about to happen. In the movie, Robert Thorn investigates Damien's background in the possibility that he's the Antichrist. With the help of this photographer, Heath Jennings. Moments after Jennings tries to convince Thorn that he must kill his son to eliminate the threat, he's decapitated by a huge pain of plate glass. Originally, the scene was scripted so that the glass would fall from above. Others would be hoisting the pain up the side of a building to place it in a window, the cable would snap, and the glass would fall onto Jennings slicing through his neck. However, when it came time to rig this stunt, the lead special effects designer, John Richardson, ran into a couple issues. Instead of falling straight down, the glass kept sweeping out at an angle as the huge pain of glass caught the air. he came up with an alternative that eventually became the scene in the movie. In that sequence, Robert and Jennings traveled to meet with an anti-Christ expert in Jerusalem. He tells Robert to look for the mark of the devil, a birthmark in the shape of three sixes to confirm Damien's true identity. And then, he gives Robert seven silver daggers and instructs him to kill Damien. Robert is shocked and horrified by the prospect, but Jennings insists it has to be done. While they argue on the street, Robert throws the daggers down an alleyway in refusal. But Jennings won't let him give up. He goes after those daggers and starts collecting them. While Jennings searches the ground, a flatbed truck carrying a huge paint of glass parks at the top of the alley, when the driver gets out, he knocks the parking brake loose without realizing it, and slowly the truck creeps backwards, gathering speed as it slips down the sloping alley until it rams into a barrier. Upon impact, one of the panes of glass slips free of its tether, and it shoots off the truck bed just as Jennings stands up, building the daggers. And it slices clean through his neck and crashes into the storefront behind him, his severed head tumbling after. On the day of filming, the news stunt pretty much went off without a hitch, and Richard Donard agreed that it made for an even more impactful moment than the original, and he gave all of the credit to John Richardson. But what happened next, is really what would go on to cement the legend of the Omen curse. After production wrapped, John Richardson was hired to work on another movie, a bridge too far. It was this World War II epic set in the Netherlands. I imagine it was a nice change of pace after weeks of working on the Omen. One night, John was out driving on his way back from a long shoot day. He was with his girlfriend, Liz Moore, who also worked in special effects. In fact, she had also worked on the Omen. It was late, almost after midnight, and the roads were dark and winding. Maybe John was exhausted, maybe the curve in the road was just sharper than he expected. Maybe he was distracted by the radio suddenly buzzing with static. When all of a sudden, it was a head-on collision. John was thrown from the car, and was knocked completely unconscious. And when he woke up, he saw just how horrible the scene was. On one side of him, he saw Liz, who had been decapitated by a tire that smashed into the car. And on the other side, he turned, and he saw this big blue street sign, one of the headlights making it gleam in the darkness, and it read 66.6 kilometers to Omen, a nearby city. In the decades following the film's release, director Richard Donor hasn't really put much stock in the rumors of a curse. He thinks that, no matter what kind of movie you're filming, the themes and the tone are always going to be amplified in your memory. They were making a horror movie, so the horrible things that happened are the ones that stuck out, and if they had been making a comedy, all anyone would remember are the laughs. But both producer Harvey Bernhard and advisor Robert Munger walked away from that experience with a totally changed perspective. Munger had to admit that his friend was right. After everything he had seen, the devil throughout them, he was now a believer. The Omen was hardly the first horror movie people believed to be cursed. Actually, we can go even farther back to one of the first horror movies ever, and we can still find signs that something just wasn't right. Most Ratu is the OG film vampire, and even today, over 100 years later, he's horrific. Even if you haven't seen the original 1922 movie, I guarantee that you recognize Count Orlock, long, spindled fingers, studded with sharp claws, he has this towering frame, his pale white skin, and two wronged fangs, like a rat. Most Ratu is arguably one of the most important horror films ever made, not only because of its influence on so many subsequent horror movies and filmmakers, but because in many ways, it defined our expectations for horror and horror movies, which is wild, because no one was ever supposed to see this film. But before we get into that part of it, let me give you a quick summary. The full title, Nosferatu, a symphony of horror, was a silent film released in Germany in 1922. It follows the story of Thomas Hutter, a real estate agent, his wife Ellen, and the bizarre pseudo love triangle they find themselves in with Count Orlock, a Transylvania nobleman who is also a vampire. Hutter is sent to Transylvania to meet Orlock and finalize his purchase of a house in Hutter's town, Wiseborg. On his way there, Hutter stops at an inn where the people there are terrified just by the mention of Orlock's name, and in his room that night, Hutter finds a book on vampires and decides he's going to bring it with him. When he arrives at Orlock's castle, he meets with the Count and presents him with the contract to finalize and sign. Orlock sees a picture of Ellen amongst Hutter's belongings and comments on her lovely neck. At dinner, Hutter cuts his thumb and he's horrified when Orlock tries to suck the wound clean. And then, when he wakes up the next morning, he finds two fresh puncture wounds on his neck. After consulting the book about vampires, he begins to suspect that Orlock is a vampire, and then while wandering around the castle, he finds Orlock sleeping in a coffin. So suspicions confirmed. Now terrified for his life, Hutter hides in Orlock's castle, he sees Orlock loot several coffins onto a carriage before climbing into one himself, and then, riding off into the night, Hutter makes his escape and he flees back home to Wiseborg. And soon after, Orlock also arrives in Wiseborg and moves into his new house. He brings with him a plague of pestilence, spread by rats throughout the city. Hutter's friends and neighbors start dying from this disease. Ellen then finds a book about vampires and realizes the truth about Orlock and the source of the plague, and to save the town, Ellen decides to sacrifice herself. She offers herself to Orlock, allowing him to drink her blood, distracting him until sunrise, and when the sunlight falls on Orlock, he's destroyed, vanishing, leaving only a puff of smoke behind. Now, Nosferatu went on to define the vampire legend, and the film created tropes and lore that still hold today, like the idea that vampires spread disease, and also that they can be killed by sunlight. That is original to the first Nosferatu. That point actually, vampires being killed in sunlight was due to the film's budget. The production didn't have money for fancy special effects, so blasting Orlock into a puff of smoke was the solution to make him disappear. For the most part, Nosferatu was a brainchild of producer Albin Grouw. As he tells it, he found inspiration for the picture while he was serving in World War 1. Grouw claimed that in the winter of 1916, while he was serving in the German army, he was dispatched to a small village where he met a Serbian farmer. The old man told Grouw that his father had been killed in a blood feud and was buried without proper sacraments. The unholy act transformed his father into a vampire, and night after night, he haunted the village. Grouw claimed that the man showed him an official document describing the way that they went and dug up his father's body to end the torment. The paper claimed that the corpse was perfectly preserved, except for the two front teeth, which now extended well below his bottom lip and two pointed fangs. The local priest drove a stake through his heart, the Nosferatu's heart, and it let out a sigh and then died. Now this story really resonated with Grouw when he heard it. He had just come back from the war and he likened World War 1 to a cosmic vampire drinking the blood of millions. Now after his time in the army, Grouw returned to Berlin, and in kind of an attempt to make sense of the horror that he witnessed and more, he became a serious student of the occult. He was a member of the Rosa Crucian Magical Order, and later the Fraternita Saturni, under the name Master Pacicius. Now, back in 1922, dabbling in the occult was not necessarily all that uncommon, everyone had suffered so much death between the war and the Spanish flu that happened afterwards. Once that remained, searched for answers and mysticism, why were they spared when so many of their loved ones weren't? What happened to those that they had lost? But Grouw was a major player in German mystic circles, even taking part in the infamous WADA conference where occult leaders from around the world gathered in Germany, including the most famous occultists at the time, Alistair Crowley. Now Grouw's connection to the occult was peppered all throughout Nosferatu. Look, occult is literally baked into the film. The letters between Orlach and his servant, Nock, who also happens to be Huddersboss, are written in a Nockian. A Nockian was a 16th century occult language recorded in a British alchemist personal journals, only someone who was very steeped in the world of magic would even know that this language existed. There were also references to a Swiss alchemist who the Rosa Crucians regarded as a prophet, Now, ironically, this alchemist was actually one of the first opponents to bloodletting as a medical treatment, kind of ironic for vampires. Grouw also contributed to Orlach's backstory that he was created by an Archdemon Baleol. In the Bible, Baleol is linked with pestilence, and Orlach was a literal bringer of the disease, and Wiseborg with thousands of plague-infested rats, and he also. So looks like a rat, which was another choice that grouse specifically was responsible for. Now, as a cultism later fell out of favor, it cast a pall on the fates of those connected to Nosferatu, and that's when the discussion of the film being cursed really began. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. 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A lot of people believe that Nosferatu's curse was actually the result of fascism. A lot of people believe that Nosferatu's curse was maybe caused by something other than the paranormal. First, the screenwriter Henrik Galeen was Jewish and he was forced to leave Germany in 1933. Actors Gustav Wangenheim and Alexander Garnos, who played Hunter and Knock respectively, they both fled Germany for the USSR because of their communist backgrounds. Jewish actor John got out who played Dr. Van Helsing. He went into hiding in Poland, disguising himself as a Catholic priest and was murdered by the SS in 1942. As for Grouw, when the Nazis came to power, all kinds of groups were targeted by the regime. The Fraternita Saturni Grouw's order was outlawed in 1936 and he was threatened with persecution. He did manage to flee to Switzerland where he lived until the end of World War II. Now, director F.W. Murnau was actually gay and sensing the rising Nazi tide in his homeland he moved to Hollywood in 1927. Unlike so many others, Murnau did continue his trade, cementing his legacy as one of the most influential directors of the silent film era. His first American movie, Sunrise won three Oscars at the first ever Academy Awards ceremony. In 1931, Murnau was on a high. His latest film, Taboo, was set to release in a few weeks. He owned two properties, a house in Hollywood land and a farm in Oregon. He was also in love. But something trickled in the back of his consciousness, a warning. Murnau was expected in New York City for all the press and hubbub leading up to the release, but he couldn't shake this feeling that his trip was doomed. At his last reading, his astrologer had cautioned him against traveling on land. He would just have to put his foot down. There was no way that he could board a train and take it to New York. Instead, on the afternoon of March 10, 1931, Murnau left his house in Santa Monica with a chauffeur and personal valet driving south on the PCH towards the marina. Instead of a train, he was going to take a steamship to New York. But as the car raced down the caraning curves of the coastal highway, a truck approached from the other direction, and it drifted over the line. Burving to avoid a head-on collision, Murnau's car skidded off the road and down the steep embankment, barrel rolling end-over-end, eventually landing upside down. Murnau died the next day from his injuries, and a lot of people, point to the fact that the astrologer did warn him about traveling on land. Now the final element of the Nosferatu curse has nothing to do with the occult. If Murnau and Grouw and the rest were really cursed, what they suffered from was actually copyright laws. See, even though Grouw waxed poetic about the Serbian farmer and the scourge of World War I, it was plain to anyone with eyes that Nosferatu drew heavily from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Sure, they changed locations, they gave everyone new names, they added their own little flourishes to the vampire lore, but the basic framework was practically identical. When Bram Stoker's widow Florence found out about the unlicensed adaptation, she sued the absolute pants off of Grouw and his production company for copyright violation, and not really a surprise to anyone but she won the case. When she realized that she wouldn't receive any of the proceeds from the film, though, because there weren't any of the studio had declared bankruptcy, she insisted instead that all of the copies of Nosferatu be destroyed, and for some reason the judge agreed. So the original film negatives were shredded, except this movie has lasted over 100 years, you can't kill it like a vampire. It's even on YouTube. Luckily, copies had already been sent to France, Spain, Japan, and America. They not only survived, but they continued to be copied and shared around the world. Only now it was with this air of secrecy, just watching the movie was doing something forbidden. Florence Stoker's campaign of vengeance transformed Nosferatu into its own legend, a haunting creature of the shadows that refuses to die. So maybe it's just a curse of irony. But what do you guys think? Now I turn it over to you. After hearing everything do you believe that these films are cursed, even just watching them might make you curse some say. So I hope that you go and watch these movies this weekend, now that we're in the spooky season, watch them and get back to me. That's all I have for you this week. We're going to be back here next week with another episode for you all, still in spooky season. I will see you then, and until then, stay curious. Woo! Woo! Heart Starts pounding is written and produced by me, Kiela Moore. Our socio-producer is Juno Hobbs. Heart Starts pounding is also produced by Matt Brown, additional research and writing by Abigail Cannon. Designed and mixed by Red Room Creative. Video editing by Creative Step. Special thanks to Travis Dunlop, Grayson Journey and the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request, check out Heart Starts pounding.com.