How Did They Get Real Skeletons To Use In The Movie Poltergeist?
Articulated skeletons are available for teaching and likely other uses. I don’t know if anyone has explained where the real ones were obtained, but this occurred in “Poltergeist II: The Other Side”, not in “Poltergeist” as far as I’ve ever heard.
To ease people’s minds, Will Sampson, who co-stars in “PII”, conducted a ceremony~not an exorcism, as is claimed some places. I know this because he and Craig T. Nelson were interviewed several times. Sampson is the person who told them that they has real skeletons among the remains, something they apparently were unaware of while compiling props for the cave scenes.
From IMDb:
The ritual (though IMDb has “exorcism”) was performed by Will Sampson, who was a real-life shaman for “several different groups” before his death in 1987. Studio security was instructed to leave the set unlocked and unguarded so Sampson could return in the middle of the night to perform the ceremony.
EDIT: Hmmmm… Now, they are claiming that real skeletons were used in “Poltergeist”, which was never stated in any interviews with Steven Spielberg or the cast. Of course, this is in IMDb trivia, which anyone can add to. All I can say is that, according to cast members, the real ones were ONLY in the second film. The cadavers in “Poltergeist” were created for the movie. When JoBeth Williams was nervous about being in the pool scene because of all of the electrical equipment and the icky-looking corpses, Spielberg reassured her by getting into the pool, too!
MystMoon
16 Jan, 2010
i doubt they are real. Have you heard the curse about that movie??
Autumn
16 Jan, 2010
ummm… perhaps they were fake?
Anonymous
16 Jan, 2010
Maybe they digged up a new grave.
Who knows.
Jenna
3 Mar, 2010
I’m confused. Spielberg was the producer, not the director, of those movies. What would he be doing on set, encouraging actors?