My friends knew that if they came to see us when we lived in San Diego, we were going to visit Los Angeles. And they knew, if we visited Los Angeles, we would stop by a celebrity cemetery. I don’t know why it fascinates me so to see the final resting place of the famous, but it does.
One cemetery in particular, Westwood Memorial Park, has many famous people buried there. But when I saw that both Dominique Dunn and Heather O’Rourke were buried here, close together, it made me sad. Both were so young and so talented, and died earlier than it seemed they should have.
If you do not know who Dominique and Heather are, they are the young stars of the horror movie Poltergeist. Poltergeist came out in 1982 and promptly scared the heck out of me. But, when you consider all the behind-the-scenes stuff, it is even scarier. There are tales of weird happenings on the set such as the young actor playing the son actually choking while being “choked” in the scene with the possessed clown. Perhaps the strangest thing was the premature deaths of some of the stars of the movie. A mere five months after the release of the movie, Dominique Dunne, a rising young star and the daughter of author Dominick Dunne, was strangled to death by her boyfriend. The “curse” didn’t seem to stop with the first movie. Poltergeist II was released in 1986 and actor Julian Beck played the scary character Reverand Henry Kane. He died of stomach cancer a few months after the movie was wrapped. Native American actor Will Sampson, who was in Poltergeist II, died of complications during a heart-lung transplant a year after the movie was released. The final heartbreaking death was that of Heather O’Rourke. While on a break from filming Poltergeist III, Heather died from an intestinal blockage at the young age of 12.
So as I stood there in the cemetery, looking at the graves of Dominique and Heather, I wondered if there really was a Poltergeist curse. Probably not, but I definitely felt a sadness for the loss of these two young actresses.
You can purchase the Poltergeist DVD at Amazon.com.