Listen Now: American Hysteria - Movie Curses

Hey Zach, are you smiling at my gorgeous canyon view?

No, Donald.

I'm smiling because I've got something I want to tell the whole world.

Well, do it.

Shout it out.

T-Mobile's Got Home Internet.

Minute, Minnett.

Whoa, I love that echo.

T-Mobile's Got Home Internet Internet.

How much is it?

Look at that, Zach.

We got the neighbors' attention.

Just $35 a month.

And you love a great deal, Denise.

Plus, they've got a five-year price guarantee.

That's five whole trips around the sun.

I'm switching.

Yes, T-Mobile home internet for the neighborhood.

Donald, you still haven't returned my weed whacker.

Carl, don't you embarrass me like this, please?

What's everyone yelling about?

T-Mobile's got home internet.

And then Donald's got my weed whacker.

Yes, T-Mobile's got home internet.

Just $35 a month with autopay and any voice line.

And it's guaranteed for five years.

Yodeling!

Beautiful yodeling, Carl.

Texas of these applied.

Ctmobile.com slash ISP for details and exclusions.

Audival's romance collection has something to satisfy every side of you.

When it comes to what kind of romance you're into, you don't have to choose just one.

Fancy a dalliance with a duke or maybe a steamy billionaire.

You could find a book boyfriend in the city and another one tearing it up on the hockey field.

And if nothing on this earth satisfies, you can always find love in another realm.

Discover modern rom-coms from authors like Lily Chu and Allie Hazelwood, the latest romanticy series from Sarah J.

Maas and Rebecca Yaros, plus regency regency favorites like Bridgerton and Outlander, and of course, all the really steamy stuff.

Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash wondery.

That's audible.com slash wondery.

Hi, it's Sarah Gibson Tuttle, the founder of Olive in June.

Can I tell you the one thing that always makes my day better?

A fresh manicure.

But here's the thing.

Who has the time or budget to go to the nail salon every week?

That's why we created the Olive in June Gel Mani system.

It gives you that same glossy, long-lasting Mani you get at a salon for so much less.

It comes with everything you need, a pro-level LED lamp, salon-grade tools, our damage-free gel polish that lasts up to 21 days.

Just prep, paint, cure, and you're good to go.

And the best part, it's so easy and super affordable.

So skip that $80 salon appointment.

Get that salon quality look at home on your schedule.

Head to oliveinjune.com/slash manni magic20 and use code Manny Magic20 for 20% off your first gel system.

That's oliveinjune.com slash Manny Magic20.

Code Manny Magic20 for 20% off your first gel Manny system.

Hello, dear listeners.

October marches on, and so our spooky coverage continues, not just on our feed, but on American Hysteria.

We had the privilege and the pleasure of sitting down with Chelsea Weber Smith, the poet-turned podcaster and host of a podcast that explores how fantastical thinking has shaped our culture.

Everything from moral panics to urban legends, hoaxes, crazes, fringe beliefs, national misunderstandings, and even film curses.

Please enjoy a preview of our conversation with Chelsea on cursed films.

Are they real, or is there something more insidious at play?

If you enjoy this preview, head on over to American Hysteria to check out our episode with Chelsea.

And otherwise, we'll catch you on Monday.

You're trying to sell the idea that a movie is real to suspend people's disbelief.

And here comes this idea that it's so real that it haunted the people on set.

And you could actually, it's risky for you to watch this.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's a great sales pitch.

What Went Wrong is a podcast that takes a loving look at Hollywood's most disastrous movie productions and happens to be one of my favorite shows out there.

Hosts Chris Winterbauer and Lizzie Bassett joined me to tell the stories of three allegedly cursed horror movies, the potentially paranormal forces that affected their productions and releases, as well as the tragedies and unexplained events that befell the cast, crew, and sometimes, even the audiences.

Were these films really possessed by dangerous otherworldly energy?

Or are we dealing with social conditions, marketing gimmicks, and safety violations that are all too human?

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

I am thrilled to introduce these two podcasters from one of my most favorite, truly most favorite podcasts out there, What Went Wrong.

And welcome, Chris and Lizzie.

Thank you so much for talking to me today.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you for having us.

We're very excited.

I'm so excited.

And today, we are talking about a very fun topic that I think kind of permeates the world of horror movies and has for a long time, and that is the curses that follow some of the darker movies made in the last hundred years.

So, today we're going to cover three of them, and we'll get to, you know, we'll surprise you with what those are as we go along.

But first, I thought it'd be fun to

talk to both of you about

your feeling about the curses, about the paranormal.

Are we skeptics?

Are we believers?

Where do we stand?

I will say I'm just very easily convinced either way.

I can be easily convinced of a ghost, and then I can be just as easily convinced that it is someone in a sheet.

So I really, I will go whatever way the wind blows.

I like that.

But I love the idea of ghosts.

I like the idea of curses, not don't curse me.

No.

But I have always been, you know, excited about the the idea of the paranormal, even with, I think, the knowledge in the back of my head always that like it's probably not real, but I'm happy to believe in it.

You like to have fun.

I like to have fun.

Yeah.

All right, Chris.

What about you?

Chris, no fun, Winner Bauer.

So I will say, no, no, no, no.

I love the stories.

I will.

sit and listen to a YouTube story, you know, Mr.

Balin telling a weird random ghost story.

I'm like, I don't know who this gentleman is.

I don't don't know why I'm listening to him, but this is compelling.

It's interesting.

Do I?

I do not.

I am a skeptic.

I am not a religious person.

I am not,

although I would call myself a humanist, I'm not a very spiritual person.

And though I think there are many interesting things in the universe we cannot explain, and I'm open to the idea of forces that may connect us.

No, I'm not a big curse believer, not a big ghost believer.

And I have a lot of theories as to why movies in particular are

particularly potent vectors for stories like these and why we do tend to get these clusterings of tragedy,

perhaps mishaps escalating into tragedies, you know, in certain examples with movies.

But the stories themselves, yes, of course, they're biblical in many senses.

They feel almost primordial in many senses.

The idea of luck and

karma are ideas that have permeated our society.

And I think especially American individualist society, where your fortunes rise and fall according to your merits, supposedly, in the United States.

That all ties into these ideas of cursing and the justice or injustice of them, as well as the idea of movies themselves, which are ultimately you're watching ghosts of people on screen.

And so there's something really compelling about movies and ghosts and curses, and it's all made up, but I find it very compelling, or I feel that it is, an attempt at the brain to rationalize patterns that may not actually be there.

Yeah.

So we've got a paranormal sociologist on our hands.

It sounds like

you have a douchebag armchair psychologist on your hands.

I'll take it.

I'll take it.

Well, it is kind of the same appeal as conspiracy theories, I think.

Like

these sort of paranormal things.

It's exactly what Chris said.

It's to make sense of the chaos.

And as much as I wish I was someone who did not desire to make sense of the chaos, I most certainly do.

Yes.

And I think we all have our own favorite, or I have my own personal favorite conspiracy theory that I don't actually believe, but I find it

like ancient aliens, I think is amazing.

I think it's absurd.

Graham Hancock, Chariots of the Gods.

It's all so silly.

It's so ridiculous.

But do I kind of like watching that Netflix show about it?

Sure.

It's very fun.

So I think we all have that outlet, you know, that we need with some of these.

That's, you're right.

And I think that

I think I'm somewhere between both of you, actually, in that, you know, our show is about, well, I never like to say our show is a debunking show because I do not debunk.

But, you know, we do look at a lot of things that are fantastical beliefs and then try to figure out kind of, as Chris, you were saying, like, what are the political and social and cultural forces that might be driving this to break into our world psychologically, these different paranormal phenomena?

So I definitely lean on that side, but I've had a lot of ghost experiences, I've had a lot of hauntings in my life.

Do I believe in my own experience?

Not necessarily, but you know, so I land somewhere in the middle.

So,

we'll see what we think about these curses as a trio here.

Shall we get into it?

Yes.

Let's do it.

All right, perfect.

So, I will be starting with the 1973 horror classic, The Exorcist.

Have you both seen The Exorcist?

Oh, yes.

You have.

Yes.

What was your experience with The Exorcist?

What was your first experience, kind of as you do on the show?

I'm interested in that.

I saw it very young, arguably far too young to have watched that movie.

And I remember not being particularly scared by it.

I thought it was kind of gross.

Like all I remembered was the pea soup.

And I was like, this is kind of gross.

And like, you know, it's a 70s horror movie.

It did not have a huge impact on me.

And then I watched it as an adult.

and I just remember like tears flowing out of my eyes because I was too scared to close them.

This movie absolutely scared the crap out of me the older I got.

And I'm not entirely sure what that's about.

Maybe it's a different understanding of the mother-daughter relationship in this and how upsetting it would be to see your child experiencing what Reagan's experiencing.

Or maybe it's just a growing fear of what lies beyond the grave and what may be waiting for me the closer I crawl towards it.

But yeah, man, I love this movie, really love it.

And it's absolutely just scares me to death now.

All right, Chris.

Yeah, I also, I saw it when I was very young and I didn't appreciate what it was trying to achieve with the horror that it was trying to do.

The Exorcist, relative to many satanic panic films that follow, is not schlocky.

And what I think is really wonderful about this movie is that it's ultimately a movie about a crisis of faith

with Father Karras.

And the most compelling and some of the most terrifying moments of the movie are his dream sequences and visualizations of the demon and his mother.

And this is very much somebody who has lost the faiths, you know, who's fallen from the cloth, and he rediscovers it in this beautiful moment of spoilers, self-sacrifice at the end of the film.

And Reagan really just, or once she's possessed, exists specifically to affront him, you know, and religion, and less to scare him, almost more to shock him.

And so I think it is a terrifying movie when you watch it now, especially as a parent, because

you feel helpless to help your child.

And there are a couple of Korean movies, The Wailing comes to mind that have done something similar recently.

But I think what the movie does so beautifully is it explores in a moment in America where I think there was a kind of consensus that the American dream as we had perceived it was perhaps a little more rickety than we had hoped after the promise of progress, you know, the civil rights movement and the kind of post-war boom.

You hit a 70s economic situation that wasn't as maybe strong as we had thought it was going to be.

And you've got a lot of political instability.

I think during this period, there were like 750 bomb threats a day throughout the United States because of all of the, again, political unrest.

And so I think this movie came at a moment when people, whether they felt it religiously or otherwise, felt that crisis of faith.

And he's a very relatable character.

And so I think this movie is, yes, it's a wonderful horror movie, but it actually works better as a drama.

And I think it's a really fantastic movie.

Which I think the best horror movies do.

And the other thing I will say about this movie is that they do not rely on jump scares.

There are so few.

At Grocery Outlet, we are are turning up the cheer with your chance to win free groceries for a year.

That's $6,000 in Grocery Outlet gift cards.

From October through December, one lucky winner will score the grand prize each month.

Plus, four more monthly winners get a $500 gift card.

Make your holiday shopping pay off.

Download the Grocery Outlet app and scan your wow card every time you shop for your chance to win free groceries for a year.

No purchase necessary, one entry per day.

Restriction supply.

Visit groceryoutlet.com for details.

Grocery Outlet Bargain Market.