The Manson Family threads of course mention Helter Skelter in particular and the White Album in general because they’re indelibly linked to the Manson family murder spree. The Beatles certainly never had anything to do with this (though it was touted as proof of the evils of rock in some seriously conservative Fundie sermons when I was a kid) but it’ll never shake off the stains. Once a song title has been written (even if misspelled) in a pregnant woman’s blood it’s just not likely to ever inspire a dance craze.
A few I can think of:
The Twilight Zone Movie will forever be remembered mainly as the film in which Vic Morrow and two Asian kids were killed in a stunt gone bad (the scene [not that take] remaining in the movie).
The Crow is forever the film on which Brandon Lee was accidentally killed.
Catcher in the Rye suffers much less from this than others, but the fact it was the book that John Hinckley owned several copies and excerpted in his deranged letters to Jodie Foster and that Mark David Chapman was reading when arrested for killing Lennon will usually get footnote whenever it’s discussed in any depth.
The band AC/DC (in particular the song Night Prowler) got mixed up with serial killer Richard Ramirez. He was a big fan of their’s and a clue to his identity was an AC/DC hat he left behind at a crime scence.
Obviously, the band had nothing to do with this, but they did get quite a bit of outrage and grief over it.
Anything recorded by Phil Spector has a grim shadow over it now. All those girl group songs with the babes bragging about “their man”, who of course is their whole life, their reason for existing, how the only thing they want to do is please “their man”…
This is a little off-topic, but I happened to see the Tina Turner biopic “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” on TV a few weeks ago. One of the pivotal scenes is when Phil Spector visits the Turners backstage and asks to record a song - but just Tina, not Ike, he makes clear. In the context of the movie, it represents how Tina’s star was rising, and eclipsing Ike’s. But in light of recent events, it makes Tina look like a magnet for some of the creepiest guys in rock & roll.
Well, Richard Wagner died long before Hitler came to power, and he bore absolutely no responsibility for the crimes of the Nazis… but his work is certainly tainted by the fact that he was an anti-semite and the perception that he was somehow Hitler’s unofficial court composer.
Clownhouse, a decent but unspectacular slasher film, has become notorious due to the director (Victor Salva) who was convicted of sexually molesting the 12-year-old lead actor.
The Program, a forgettable James Caan sports movie, conatined a scene in which a bunch of football playes laid in the middle of a two lane road while cars drove past them. Several [del]idiots[/del] moviegoers tried to repeat the scene, and were killed.
My mother (who has discovered “Chat” - kill me now) just offered up these two:
Peyton Place. It was a bomb until Lana Turner had an affair with gangster Jonny Stompanato, who was later killed by Turner’s daughter. That and the murder trial that followed turned it into a huge hit.
Night of the Iguana - Put Puerta Vallara on the map as a toutrist destination. Nobody had even heard of it before the movie.
(I realize neither of these are in the exact spirit of the OP, but she wanted to contribute).
One of the first urban legends I remember is that the scream heard on Love Rollercoaster, meant to be someone enjoying a roller coaster plunge, was actually a girl who worked in the studio being raped and murdered by a member of the production crew. It’s totally false but it gained currency and whenever the song is played it’s the first thing I think about.
I read a bio once of Laura Keane, the English actress who was co-star and co-owner of that play. By the time Lincoln attended she was sick and tired of it- she’d appeared in it more than 1,000 times and though it was lucrative she wanted to move onto something else. She actually planned to make her final appearance the week Lincoln was killed.
Unfortunately it was all anybody wanted to see her in and, like Yul Brynner in The King and I, she had the choice of doing roles that were more rewarding professionally and personally and maybe or maybe not making enough to pay the bills, or performing a role in a light comedy of which she wasn’t even the star and which she could perform in her sleep, for big bucks. She mostly opted for the latter, making lots of money but coming to hate the show more each time she rehearsed it. (In later productions the play would ironically stop for a somber few seconds after “sockdologizing old man trap” line even though it was the biggest laugh line in the play, because everybody knew that’s when Abraham Lincoln was shot.) She only lived a few more years, dying of tuberculosis in 1873 in a quite comfortable farmhouse paid for by that play.
Rosemary’s Baby is connected to several though tangentially. It’s connected to Helter Skelter because it was the hit movie for which Roman Polanski was best known. It’s connected to John Lennon’s murder because it’s filmed in the Dakota (including the entrance where he was shot), and of course John Lennon connects it back to [del]Kevin Bacon[/del]Helter Skelter.
I remember during the “backwards masking” craze one minister I saw on TV actually said the reason Tate and Lennon were killed was because of the movie’s glamorizing and making light of Satanism, even going so far as to get Satanic High Priest Anton LaVey to play Satan in the conception scene.
Point of fact LaVey didn’t portray Satan or anyone else in the movie, but neither did he own a black jet and a bayfront mansion in San Francisco with some of the biggest names in entertainment at his beck and call as also claimed; he was a 2 bit huckster whose bayfront “mansion” was a small houseinherited from his parents that was condemned soon after he died due to its derelict condition. However, Satanism sold in the '80s so like Manson evolving from a crazed hillbilly to a supernatural boogeyman LaVey went from a 3rd rate showman who was usually scrambling for a buck to a character out of Dan Brown or the Left Behind books.
James Oliver Huberty shot 40 people, killing 21 of them, in a Southern California McDonalds in 1984. During the shooting he was blasting the Scandal song “The Warrior” on a boom box.
“Nearer My God to Thee” is indelibly linked to the Titanic.
“Sympathy for the Devil” by the Stones was tarnished by the Altamont Festival, when someone was stabbed to death, though the actual killing took place while they were playing “Under My Thumb.”
