The Dark Knight Curse

Heightened awareness of decapitations has occurred in the last few days due to the incidents in Brazil, Dubai, Greece, and, of course, the bus event in Canada (during the showing of The Legend of Zorro). Also, please note earlier The Mask of Zorro features Zorro’s/Diego’s brother’s beheading. In that Zorro movie, the decapitation is done by a sadistic, psychotic Texian Army Captain named Harrison Love.

There remains no explanation of why the name “Badger” became the code word given to suspect Vincent Li of Edmonton, Alberta, by the law enforcement officers.

Chronologically, it should be mentioned that these news items were proceeded by a Batman-related beheading.

On Saturday, June 28th, at Six Flags Over Georgia, 17-year-old Asia Leeshawn Ferguson of Springfield, South Carolina, scaled two six-foot fences and passed through restricted areas posted as dangerous to visitors. Ferguson jumped the fences and then was decapitated by the Batman roller coaster. (It should not be lost on people that the victim of the Canadian bus beheading was a young man who told his friends he “loved being a carny.”)

On August 5, 2008, The Boston Herald reporter Stephen Schaefer asks, “Is The Dark Knight cursed?”

As those watching for the curse of threes have noticed, Heath Ledger has died, Christian Bale has been arrested and now Morgan Freeman has been in a tragic car crash.

As an update, blogger Todd Campbell, after reading the above, has forwarded the following photographs to my attention, from the movie. He has a post on this now.

Embedded within the movie (or, at least, certainly in the trailers, as shown in these photos first published by Entertainment Weekly) is the Heath Ledger character, the Joker, using the Joker/Death card as his “business calling card,” as pictured, shown holding a decapitated head. (If factual, the powerful nature of these images only being in the trailer and pre-release publicity photos but not in the actual film is significant. The trailer carries the keys to mass public programming to “sell” the motion picture.)

Schaefer writes that The Dark Knight joins a grim list of “cursed” motion pictures.

The Superman hex struck Christopher Reeve, who shot to fame after starring in the 1978 movie, after he broke his neck in a horse riding accident. Television’s original “Superman,” George Reeves died in an apparent suicide in 1969.

(In June 2007, a teenager’s legs were severed when cables snapped on the Superman Tower of Power ride at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom in Louisville, Kentucky.)

The 1982 horror classic Poltergeist was haunted by the premature deaths of two of its female stars. Vanity Fair celebrity scribe Dominick Dunne’s daughter Dominique was murdered by her live-in lover soon after the film was finished. And Heather O’Rourke, the film’s child star, died in 1988 at age 12 of cardiopulmonary arrest prompted by Crohn’s disease.

I have written of the “Mothman Death Curse” online and specifically in the August 2004 issue of Fortean Times, with a list of over 80-related deaths, some of surprisingly young people and others of elder members of the crew, cast, and aligned associates of the film.

From Batman to Mothman, whether or not there are curses is not important. The fact that they have become part of popular culture and that there is a dark sense that there may be such things in the modern world, in the end, may be what becomes more significant.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

Email • Facebook • Twitter •