Trivia / The Curse (1987)

• Box Office Bomb: Budget $4 million, Box office: $1.9 million.
• California Doubling: Set in Tennessee, the interiors were actually shot in Rome. The farm scenes were done on David Keith's farm property in Tellico Plains, which is in Tennessee.
• Creator Backlash: When interviewed for the documentary Showbiz Kids, Wil Wheaton pulled no punches, calling it a "shitty horror movie" and said that he only took the role after his parents bribed him with a trip to Rome. In his 2022 memoir Still Just a Geek, he is even more negative, saying that he and his sister were downright abused during the production, and that he blames his parents' decision to make him do the film for effectively ruining his chance to get more "respectable" dramatic roles after Stand by Me. He refuses to sign posters of the film at conventions, telling fans that he does not wish to be associated with the movie at all.
• Friendship on the Set: Wil Wheaton has nothing but good things to say about Malcolm Danare, who played his older brother; describing him as "kind and gentle, and made both of us feel safer whenever he was around".
• Money, Dear Boy: Wil Wheaton didn't want to do the film but was forced into it by his parents because he was being offered $100,000.
• Real-Life Relative: Zack's sister Alice is played by Wil Wheaton's younger sister Amy.
• Star-Derailing Role: This set Wil Wheaton's career back after Stand by Me had been such a hit. He had hoped to pursue more serious dramas, but this film "cashed me out of respectable films forever".
• Troubled Production: Wil Wheaton later detailed what a nightmarish production the film was for him:
  • Director David Keith was apparently "coked out of his mind" for most of the shoot, and his inexperience meant he was soon in way over his head.
  • He was thirteen and his sister was nine, and the production broke child labour laws to work them for twelve hour days. And rather than giving them any breaks, the children were shunted to the second and third units. He claims he was exhausted the whole time.
  • He was inappropriately touched by two adults during filming and kept quiet about it, fearing his father wouldn't believe him and his mother would blame him.
  • There were scenes that required smoke, and the production cut corners and burned hay on set, rather than using prop smoke. Likewise, for a scene in which he had to run through a collapsing house, he had buckets of plaster, broken wood and wallpaper thrown in his face repeatedly.
  • For the scene where Alice is attacked by chickens, Italian horror director Lucio Fulci was hired to direct, and his idea was to throw live birds at Amy Wheaton. The birds were then tied to the nine-year-old actress so that they would peck her. This happened in full view of her mother, who gave it her approval.
  • When Zack is pushed into a pile of cow excrement, David Keith lied to Wil Wheaton that it was prop mud. And when filming the scene, he discovered that it was the actual stuff. When the actor complained, he just got laughed at and told "if it bothers you that much, we'll get you a hepatitis shot".
  • Wil Wheaton also found out that, for a scene where Alice is required to have cuts and bruises on her face, the make-up department decided they would actually cut Amy Wheaton's face with a scalpel. Remember that she was nine years old at this point. He describes this as being the one thing their mother actually did get annoyed with the production about.
  • Both Wheatons recall a blazing argument with their parents, where Wil wanted to drop out and leave the film because the production was so awful and the script so terrible. Their mother lied to him that he wasn't getting any other offers, and their father told him he had no choice but to finish the film. Both parents later denied that this argument happened, but his sister backed him up.
  • The final film was a critical and commercial failure, and saw a lot of the good press from Stand by Me drying up overnight; the actor noting that he only got offers for "mindless comedies or exploitative horror films" afterwards. While he was able to rebound with Star Trek: The Next Generation, he has not watched the film since out of fear of triggering his PTSD and has stated that he won't ever autograph merchandise for it. He was going to include a section on it in his autobiography, but writing even the above editorial took him a week to write and required an EMDR appointment after he started having PTSD nightmares.
• Vindicated by Cable: It bombed at the box office, but it ended up being successful enough on the home video market that its distributors tried to capitalize on it by re-branding several unrelated movies as In Name Only sequels.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The film was initially planned as a remake of Die, Monster Die! from 1965, which was an adaptation of The Color Out of Space too. A working title was The Farm.
  • Treat Williams was announced as starring for a while, but never appeared in the film itself.