'Poltergeist' Featured Actual Skeletons as Film Props?

In October 2024, some web customers acquired within the Halloween spirit by making posts on X (archived), Facebook (archived), and different social media sites claiming that the skeletons featured in a notoriously spooky scene from the 1982 movie “Poltergeist” have been real human skeletons, not replicas.

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The declare was removed from new. In truth, Snopes first investigated it in 2017.

As we discovered again then, a number of statements from two completely different individuals who labored on the scene provide convincing proof that the movie’s artwork division did certainly use actual human skeletons for a scene, embedded beneath, wherein the character Diane Freeling falls into an unfinished swimming pool and finds herself surrounded by decaying skeletons. Because of this, we have rated the declare true.

JoBeth Williams, the actor who performed Diane Freeling, has said on a number of separate events that the skeletons have been actual. In a 2008 interview for the TV Land present “TV Land: Myths & Legends,” as an example, she stated:

It’s a must to perceive that this sequence took in all probability 4 or 5 days to shoot. So I used to be in mud and goop all day each day for like 4 or 5 days with skeletons throughout me [as I was] screaming. In my innocence and naiveté, I assumed that these weren’t actual skeletons. I assumed that they have been prop skeletons made out of plastic or rubber. I came upon — as did the entire crew — that they have been utilizing actual skeletons, as a result of it is too costly to make faux skeletons out of rubber. And I believe everyone acquired actual creeped out by the concept of that.

Equally, in a 2023 interview for the podcast “Hot Flashes & Cool Topics,” Williams stated:

I believed the skeletons have been props. I believed they have been made by the prop division, however I came upon some years later that they have been really actual skeletons, and I believed, if I had recognized that, I do not know if I may have gotten into that mess.

Craig Reardon, a special-effects make-up artist who labored on “Poltergeist,” has likewise stated on a number of events that the skeletons have been actual, whereas additionally providing some further particulars about why the artwork division selected to make use of actual skeletons from a organic provide firm relatively than duplicate ones.

In a 2017 interview for the horror fan podcast and web site Bloody Good Horror, Reardon stated:

I will describe very merely what the “actual skeletons” have been all about. The skeletons I ordered in 1981 have been featured within the catalog of an organization that gives organic provides. They got here wired collectively for show in school rooms and included a steel stand and a vinyl cowl. I ordered about 12 or 13 of them. Please attempt to include your horror on the quantity 13! Alternatively, the corporate additionally provided plastic skeletons for a similar objective: classroom examine. The disadvantage was that the plastic skeletons have been actually all replicas of 1 authentic sculpture or mildew, whereas, the true skeletons have been all completely different. This was identified within the catalog. Additionally, the plastic skeletons have been really dearer, presumably due to the supplies and labor required to supply one among them. For these causes, buying the true skeletons was a no brainer, and so I did.

A bit of later within the interview, Reardon described how he and his colleagues turned the “very clear classroom skeletons” they acquired into “semi-realistic” decaying corpses utilizing “melodramatic sculpture and exaggerated textures and colours.”

Reardon once more cited value as the explanation for the choice when he appeared in a 2020 episode of “Cursed Movies,” a collection produced by the horror-focused streaming service Shudder. In that episode, he stated:

No low-budget B movie goes to pay anyone to sculpt a human skeleton, when all you needed to do was go to a organic provide home and get a human skeleton. You already know, get up and odor the funds.

In the identical phase, Reardon additionally expressed frustration with the persistence of on-line allegations that using actual skeletons on the “Poltergeist” set in some way brought on a collection of incidents that subsequently befell the movie’s solid.

These incidents included the sudden deaths of two younger actors, Dominique Dunne, who performed Dana Freeling within the first “Poltergeist” film, and Heather O’Rourke, who performed Carol Anne Freeling in all three movies of the unique trilogy. In 1999, Snopes investigated — and rated false — the rumor that these deaths resulted from a curse on the movie’s solid and crew.

Concerning that rumor, Reardon stated in 2020:

The topic of the skeletons that have been utilized in Poltergeist, to my utter amazement, has created type of a web-based mythology, and never a fairly one. Apparently, there is a contingent of individuals on the market who imagine that the truth that actual human skeletons have been used [was] some type of pretext to “clarify” — air quotes — why two actresses that labored on the movie subsequently died, which isn’t solely simply conceptually ridiculous, however is personally offensive to me. This is one thing I suppose they do not know, and that is the truth that human skeletons have been utilized in films for years and years.

In accordance with Reardon, different well-known movies that used actual human skeletons as props included 1931’s “Frankenstein” and 1959’s “House on Haunted Hill.”

Snopes’ archives contributed to this report.

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