These 4 Terrifying Horror Movie Sets Were Blessed By Priests
Sometimes, a horror movie goes beyond fear. And in the most extreme cases, producers have actually been known to call in spiritual backup because of strange occurrences. Here are four scary movies so utterly terrifying, producers had priests come in to bless the sets.
The set of ‘The Exorcist’ burned down
The Exorcist is widely known as one of the scariest horror movies of all time. William Friedkin’s horror masterpiece successfully toys with taboo themes of religion and evil. But in one particularly chilling incident, things got a little too real for the director.
Per Looper, a bird collision with an on-set circuit box caused a fire that burned down the entire Exorcist house. However, one room reportedly remained intact; that of the possessed lead character, Regan (played by Linda Blair).
This was just another in a string of strange on-set incidents that took place surrounding the film. But Friedkin did corroborate the fire years later in a video on the Oscars YouTube channel.
”Interestingly, (the fire) was while we were shooting the exorcism scene,” Friedkin explained.
“That’s the only thing that happened during the entire film that I thought was some kind of bad karma.”
Mckenna Grace recounted a priest blessing the set of horror movie ‘Annabelle Comes Home’
In 2019, Bustle reported that star Mckenna Grace had an unexplained nosebleed on the set of The Conjuring prequel. Producers subsequently called in a priest for a holy blessing on the set.
“Mr. Father Tom, who was our priest — he was very, very kind and nice and he gave me a rosary that was blessed by the Pope Francis,” Grace told reporters, per Bustle. “He brought holy water and he recited this prayer in the artifact room. And he blessed me and [co-stars] Madison [Inman] and Katie [Sarife] … It was a really cool experience.”
Similarly, Malignant director James Wan brought in a priest to bless the set of The Conjuring 2.
“You know what was interesting, we didn’t necessarily have anything scary or creepy happen on the filming of the first movie that I know of,” Want told Peter T. Chattaway of Filmchat in a 2016 article.
Still, Wan recounted that crew members told creepy stories. So he agreed to have a priest bless the set, “because of the nature of the movie that we were making, I think that made its way into the psyche of their head and kind of affected them in some ways, so I think, moving ahead, I don’t know whose idea it was to bring a priest down to bless the set, but I’m all good with that,” he said. “You can never have too much good blessing. (laughs) Nothing bad happened on this set, so it must have worked!”
Horror movie ‘The Nun’ also got a pre-production blessing
In the same vein as The Conjuring 2 and Annabelle Comes Home, The set of The Nun also got an official priest’s blessing. The horror movie is a spinoff of The Conjuring 2, and writer/producer James Wan was once again involved in the production.
According to Wikipedia, the set was blessed in 2017 by an Eastern Orthodox priest.
To sum up, there are movies so bone-chilling that spiritual protection is in order. Whether or not these blessings actually work is another story.
