Many people said the devil wouldn't allow such a film to be made, the number of mysterious events surrounding the original filming of the Omen has
plagued cast members since:
In June 1975, just two months before filming was due to begin, Gregory Peck’s son had killed himself with a bullet to the head. The actor set
off for London in September in a sombre mood which wasn’t much soothed when his plane was hit by lightning high above the Atlantic. A few weeks
later, executive producer Mace Neufeld also left Los Angeles. You think lightning doesn’t strike twice? It does in this story. “It was the
roughest five minutes I’ve ever had on an airliner,” says Neufeld. The curse of The Omen had begun.
There was much more to come. The hotel in which Neufeld and his wife were staying was bombed by the IRA. So, too, was a restaurant where the
executives and actors, including Peck, were expected for dinner on November 12.
A plane they had been due to hire for aerial filming was switched to another client at the last minute and crashed on take-off, killing all on
board.
A tiger handler helped in the filming of the Omen, informing cast and crew of the correct procedures when handling animals. Two weeks after filming
the handler was pulled into the lions enclosure by his head and eaten alive.
Even when filming finished, the curse seemed to follow the actors and technicians to different projects. Richardson we know about, but the story
of stuntman Alf Joint is almost as chilling. He too went to work on A Bridge Too Far, but was badly injured and hospitalised when a stunt went wrong.
He only had to jump from a roof on to an airbag, an average day’s work for someone like him. But this time, something odd happened. He appeared to
fall suddenly and awkwardly. When he woke up in hospital, he told friends he felt like he had been pushed.
Still an unbeliever??
Last of all the strangest 'accident' yet..
A man and a woman speed towards a head-on collision which will kill one of them and burn an unforgettable image into the mind of the other.
It sounds like the pitch for a movie but, while film is at the heart of it, this story is very real indeed. The place is Holland, the year 1976, the
date August 13 – a Friday, as bad luck would have it. The man is designer John Richardson, currently working on Richard Attenborough’s second
world war epic, A Bridge Too Far, but most recently employed as special effects consultant on supernatural chiller The Omen. The woman is Liz Moore,
his assistant. In a few moments she’ll be dead, cut in half when the car’s front wheel slices through the chassis and into the passenger seat.
Richardson will survive to tell the tale – and quite a story it is too.
Less than a year earlier, he had masterminded the parade of gruesome deaths which had made The Omen a box office smash, among them the decapitation of
a photographer played by David Warner. And, like everyone else who had worked on the film – including stars Gregory Peck and Lee Remick – he was
well aware of the whispers and rumours which had surrounded its filming. There had been talk of a hex, a curse, a hoodoo.
Did he believe it? Not then, perhaps. But as he came to in the minutes after the crash, he saw something that must have chilled him to the bone: his
passenger, dead from injuries which bore an uncanny resemblance to the ones he had prepared for Warner. And a road sign marking the distance to an
otherwise insignificant Dutch town. It read: Ommen, 66.6 km.
Curse or coincidence????
Story courtesey of
The Sunday Herald 
. 
Will see if I can find any official records of the crash. 
