I heard they used real skeletons and corpses in the swimming pool scene of The Poltergeist. Is this true?
Wikipedia, this encyclopedia thingy, has an article that covers it a bit. Not a definitive answer I guess, but it does give us the source of the rumors.
In 2002, on an episode of VH1’s I Love the '80s, JoBeth Williams revealed that the production used real human skeletons when filming the swimming pool scene. Many of the people on the set were alarmed by this and led others to believe the “curse” on the film series was because of this use. Craig Reardon, a special effects artist who worked on the film, commented at the time that it was cheaper to purchase real skeletons than plastic ones, as the plastic ones involved labor in making them. Williams was not afraid of the prop skeletons, but she was nervous working in water around so many electrically powered lights. Producer Spielberg comforted her by being in the water during her scenes, claiming that if a light fell into the pool, they would both be killed.[citation needed] Poltergeist was awarded the BAFTA Award for Best Special Visual Effects and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
I know Wikipedia has an answer, but Wikipedia isn’t well known for being right all the time. Snopes has nothing on it as far as I can tell.
[moderating]
bup
October 11, 2011, 9:03pm
7
That would be skeletons. I’m going to assume the part about *corpses * mentioned in the OP is untrue unless somebody finds an extremely credible source.
In searching, it seems like most people are pointing to an episode of I Love the 80s as the original claimant for this, but I couldn’t uncover any such video on Youtube. I’m guessing urban legend.
Previous thread on this topic.
bup
October 11, 2011, 9:27pm
9
In fact, I’m an idiot. Actual corpses (that is, some flesh is evident on ‘bodies’ in the swimming pool scene ) is impossible. NFW that part is true.
Real skeleton + Modelling clay + Wig
I doubt if Poltergeist used real skeletons and corpses – it’s so much easier and cheaper to get fake ones, and you don’t have to worry about possible legal problems down the line.did use real corpses was Werner Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu . I recall reading about it at the time:
The opening sequence of the film, set to music by Popol Vuh, was filmed by Herzog himself at the Mummies of Guanajuato museum, Guanajuato, Mexico, where a large number of naturally mummified bodies of the victims of an 1833 cholera epidemic are on public display. Herzog had first seen the Guanajuato mummies while visiting in the 1960s. On his return in the 1970s he took the corpses out of the glass cases in which they are normally stored. To film them, he propped them against a wall, arranging them in a sequence running roughly from childhood to old age.[9]
Nosferatu the Vampyre (German: Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, lit. 'Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night') is a 1979 horror film written and directed by Werner Herzog. It is set primarily in 19th-century Wismar, Germany and Transylvania, and was conceived as a stylistic remake of F. W. Murnau's 1922 German Dracula adaptation Nosferatu. The picture stars Klaus Kinski as Count Dracula, Isabelle Adjani as Lucy Harker, Bruno Ganz as Jonathan Harker, and French artist-writer Roland Topor as Renfield. Ther...
The film came out in 1979, only three years before [B/Poltergeist**. I’ll bet any money Spielberg was familiar with this case.
Craig Reardon, a special effects artist who worked on the film, commented at the time that it was cheaper to purchase real skeletons than plastic ones, as the plastic ones involved labor in making them.
Not any more. China stopped exporting human skeletons in 2008 , so a real skeleton now costs ten times what a plastic one costs.
