The Poltergeist curse

A rumour that the Poltergeist films were cursed, built on the early deaths of Dominique Dunne in 1982 and Heather O'Rourke in 1988, two young members of the cast.

Two young actresses from the Poltergeist films died within six years of each other. In October 1982, the Los Angeles Times reported, Dominique Dunne was strangled. Heather O'Rourke died on 1 February 1988, aged 12. Children's Hospital in San Diego, through a spokeswoman, gave the cause as intestinal stenosis, which she described as a serious blockage of the bowel that the girl seemed to have had from birth. It caused an infection, then septic shock, then cardiac and pulmonary arrest. Later that year lawyers for O'Rourke's mother brought a wrongful-death suit saying the girl's doctors had missed a small-bowel obstruction she had lived with for years.

The curse idea grew out of those two deaths. Wikipedia describes a rumoured curse attached to the trilogy and its crew. In 1999 Barbara Mikkelson of Snopes counted four cast members who had died, adding Will Sampson, who played Taylor, and Julian Beck, who played Kane. She wrote that two of the four could be expected and two could not, that the two unexpected deaths sit at the centre of every curse rumour, and that coincidence explains them far better than a curse does.

E! True Hollywood Story covered the rumour and the deaths in 2002, in an episode called Curse of Poltergeist, Wikipedia says. In 2015 The Hollywood Reporter said a documentary, The Curse of Poltergeist, was being made by the company Vega Baby with MD Pictures, a firm based in Indonesia.