Dark Details From The Set Of Poltergeist — And How One Young Star’s Grim Fate Was Sealed

JoBeth Williams, who played Diane Freeling, said she experienced strange goings-on at her apartment. She was troubled by how the pictures on the walls would become crooked each time she left for filming no matter how often she straightened them. In 2014 she admitted to having solved the mystery on Reddit, writing, “I finally realized… that the pictures would shift because I slammed the door!” But not all happenings are so easily explained. 

Many strange incidents have happened to the cast and crew of the Poltergeist movies. So many, in fact, that it’s led to an urban legend that the films are somehow cursed. There’s much speculation about what might have caused it, but the theory is so widely believed it even prompted a 2002 E! True Hollywood Story called Curse of the Poltergeist. 

Heather O’Rourke famously played Carol Anne Freeling, but the movie could have been markedly different — because child actress Drew Barrymore auditioned for the part instead. She nearly got it too, but writer and co-producer Steven Spielberg spotted O’Rourke at the last second. In the end Barrymore went on to star in her breakthrough movie E.T., with Spielberg at the helm as director. 

The novelist for the Poltergeist book, James Kahn, had just finished writing a storm scene when a real one broke outside his office. “All the lights went out,” he said on YouTube in 2019. “The front of the window air conditioner blew off across the room and almost hit me.” And when the power came back on, it simultaneously sparked all the nearby videogames back into life at once. Pretty weird, right?

Spoiler alert! At the end of the movie, a supernatural vortex absorbs the Freeling house. Now, since otherworldly vacuums are hard to come by, the crew had to simulate the effect with a real-world machine on a model house. Ironically, the model was almost as costly as a full-scale home. And if rumors are to be believed, Spielberg now owns the diminutive replica. Or what’s left of it, anyway.

O’Rourke was fearless throughout Poltergeist — except for the bedroom scene with the haunted closet. The effect was achieved using a wind machine to blast O’Rourke’s toys around with the actress herself holding onto her headboard for dear life. It terrified the girl on the first take, but Spielberg — who was behind the cameras for this scene — instantly stopped filming, hugged her and never asked her to re-shoot the scene. 

James Karen played Mr. Teague, the man behind both building the Freelings’ house and unleashing its curse. His performance must have been a good one, because it bled into his other job. At the time he was also shooting commercials for Pathmark supermarkets, which got written complaints. They weren’t criticizing Karen’s ad performance, but Teague’s treatment of the Freeling family and all he put them through. 

Did you notice the choppy scene change during Steven and Diane’s discussion about spirits in Poltergeist’s first hour? That’s because there was more to the conversation that was edited out. Initially, the movie has Steven expressing his dislike for Pizza Hut, but the company complained. The line was cut, but it’s obvious a slice of the scene is missing. 

Did you know that the Freelings’ Cuesta Verde neighborhood is actually based on Spielberg’s home town? “I really based the neighborhood on suburban Scottsdale, Arizona, where I grew up,” he said in a press release. “It is the lifestyle of suburban America… The Freeling family in Poltergeist is not atypical of the people I knew and grew up with in Scottsdale.”

The Poltergeist franchise features a medium called Tangina. The actress who played her, Zelda Rubinstein, is also a medium in real life. What’s more, she claimed to have experienced a strange phenomenon during filming. A persistent blur of light ruined one of her Poltergeist III photoshoots. Rubinstein later reported it coincided with the time of her mother’s passing, and she doesn’t believe it was a coincidence.

During Poltergeist III special effects became all too real when a prop explosion injured three crew members. In 1987 Anton Barton, the fire chief who was on the scene, told the Chicago Tribune newspaper, “A ball of fire chased everyone out of there. There was black smoke all over the place… This was all supposed to be done with the best of taste, but somehow it got away.” 

Heather O’Rourke was serendipitously discovered in the MGM studio restaurant. In the 2000 book Steven Spielberg: Interviews the famous director recalled, “I walked over to the table and I said, ’Who’s the proud mother or agent of this child?’ And two hands went up: the mother’s and the agent’s. So I pulled Heather aside, and I think we made her the deal the next day. She’s wonderful.”

Despite daily involvement in Poltergeist, Spielberg’s contract for E.T. stated he had to give the latter film his undivided directing attention. So he worked on Poltergeist alongside Tobe Hooper, who sat in the director’s chair. But some conspiracy theorists believe Spielberg used Hooper as a ghost director, and media attention fanned the flames of such speculation. Of course, Spielberg vehemently denies the claims. 

Originally, Spielberg wanted to work with legendary horror writer Stephen King on Poltergeist’s script, but it just wasn’t to be. The novelist was “on a ship going across the Atlantic to En­gland” and couldn’t be contacted in time for the collaboration. Instead, Spielberg penned the screenplay with Mark Victor and Michael Grais, but it all worked out well in the end. 

Ever wonder why Poltergeist taps into so many fears? It’s because Spielberg’s nightmares influenced him, as he revealed in Steven Spielberg: Interviews. He explained, “Poltergeist is about my fears: of a clown doll, of a closet, of what was under my bed, of the tree in New Jersey I felt moved whenever there was a wind storm and it scared me with its long, twiggy fingers.”

Arguably one of the film's most gruesome scenes, paranormal investigator Marty’s face-tearing vision really is a sight to behold. But how did they achieve such life-like gore? Well firstly, Martin Cassella’s head had to be replicated as a destructible bust for the whopping sum of $100,000. And then came the make-up team. They slaved for ages to achieve the nightmarish oozing. It's a shame the three hours spent being made up went to waste as they'd worked on the wrong side of his face. Ouch! 

The spooky stacking kitchen chairs was director Hooper’s favorite part of Poltergeist to shoot. Crew members replaced the regular chairs in one room with a pre-stacked assortment super-quickly while just staying out of the camera’s view. In 2014 Hooper told YouTube channel Mick Garris Interviews it was “more like a magic trick than a special effect.”

When a possessed steak crawls along Marty’s kitchen counter, viewers’ skins crawl with it. The effects behind the scene are much less scary, though. The meat was actually just a normal steak set over a slot in the counter. Beneath that sat a crew member who used two wires to simulate the prop’s crawling motion. Now that’s fast food! 

Before Pennywise, Poltergeist’s evil doll personified creepy clowns, and it nearly killed Oliver Robins, who played Carol Anne’s sibling Robbie Freeling. Without special effects, Robins had to pull the clown’s arm around his neck to simulate strangling. “The contraption caught around my neck,” he told website Icons of Fright. “[Spielberg] saw that...and he pulled me away from it. Who knows what might’ve happened otherwise.”

The entity behind the Poltergeist haunting — known initially as The Beast — only showed itself twice in the original film. It was scripted for a third appearance caught on tape, though. It would have unveiled its human face, that of crazed preacher Henry Kane. This reveal was postponed for the franchise sequels instead.

For her swimming scene, Williams was understandably hesitant about climbing into a pool under heavy electrical lights. To put her at ease Spielberg himself joined her in the water, saying, “Now if a light falls in, we will both fry.” His trust in the crew paid off because both he and Williams walked away from the shoot unscathed.

Richard Matheson, who wrote The Twilight Zone episode “Little Girl Lost,” noticed similarities between his own work and Poltergeist. In the story, the titular girl travels to another dimension via her mirror, just like in the movie. In 2011 Matheson told website Ain’t It Cool News, “Poltergeist was inspired by one of mine, and I never got credit for it. ...They sort of used that idea and made their own concept of it.”

The first Poltergeist is arguably the most successful entry in the franchise, and it left a lasting imprint on MGM: the studio still uses a sound effect featured in the movie today. You know the roar from the famous MGM lion shown before all its movies? That’s the same noise that comes from The Beast during the movie’s climax. 

Despite being a horror film, Poltergeist was rated PG when it hit movie screens. But this almost wasn’t the case; there was more adult content in the original screenwriting until Hooper and Spielberg agreed on the tone. Michael Grais told British newspaper The Daily Telegraph in 2020, “Tobe would want to go harder, Steven would want to go softer and they met in the middle. They complemented each other.”

Before Poltergeist was finalized, it wasn’t just a different tone — it also had a different name. It was called either It’s Nighttime or simply Nighttime, but the planned ending was perhaps among the biggest differences. The finale featured a dark fate not just for the Freelings, but the entire neighborhood. Spielberg didn’t like the doom and gloom, though, and wrote a more hopeful finale.

The first 15 minutes of Poltergeist features an Easter Egg for eagle-eyed watchers. The Freeling parents are watching a movie in their bedroom. You might recognize it as 1943’s A Guy Named Joe, a film about a stubborn ghost who refuses to move on. Spielberg actually remade the same film in 1989 under the name Always. How’s that for coincidence? 

There’s an interesting detail behind the creation of Diane Freeling’s spectral bedroom attack. It might look like something’s pulling Williams all around the room, but it isn’t the actor who’s moving. A spinning box was set up around the camera which, when rotated, created the illusion of the spooky spectacle. The special effects team were really thinking outside the box!

Believe it or not, but reported real-life events of the Herrmann family who lived in Seaford, Long Island, inspired Poltergeist. This family experienced some strange happenings, including lots of bottles apparently moving around and uncapping themselves, some of which were allegedly witnessed by police. No explanation was ever found, though the phenomena stopped after a priest blessed the Herrmann home. They’re heeeeere! 

Who can forget that bathroom scene? You know, the one where Marty says goodbye to his face! But even taking special effects into account, not everything’s as it seems. See those hands doing the dirty work? They’re not actor Casella’s. Yup, those enthusiastic digits doing the digging are, in fact, Spielberg’s.

In the movie’s climax, some realistically gnarly skeletons emerge from the ground to attack the living. And they’re so convincing because they’re real! That’s right, the Poltergeist crew used genuine skeletons as props, which led many to speculate it brought the curse down on all involved. This was actually common practice in older Hollywood flicks since they were cheaper to acquire than fake ones.

Actor Casella was retired from Hollywood when he auditioned for the part of Marty in Poltergeist. He’d gone into teaching but applied on the off-chance. Spielberg, who had an inside joke with Casella where he’d throw car keys to him like a valet, delivered the news about the actor’s success. After tossing a ring of car keys to him, of course. 

Among the many ways The Beast tormented Robbie Freeling, being eaten by a tree was up there. Yet when you see the plant playing hungry, hungry hawthorn with Robbie, you’re actually seeing events in reverse. The scene was shot with actor Robins being flung from the tree mouth then played backwards for the final cut. 

Grais told the Poltergeist fan site, “The tree grabbing Robbie is based on an incident that happened to me when I was a small boy and woke up in a storm in our house… Lightning struck the tree in our yard. A huge branch crashed through the window close to where I was seated.” So it literally has its roots in his memories. 

Can you think what it would be like to live in the Freeling home? Well, some people don’t have to imagine! It’s a real property located in Simi Valley, California. Although it sounds like it would be exciting to visit, don’t get any ideas about having a look around. It’s owned and lived in, but you might be able to get a decent glimpse at the exterior. 

Adding fuel to the fire of the Poltergeist curse, Sampson passed away shortly after he finished filming on Poltergeist II: The Other Side. He unfortunately experienced surgery complications from which he never recovered. Among Sampson’s other roles, he also played Chief Bromden in 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and outside acting was a shaman for three tribes. 

Richard Lawson, who played Poltergeist’s Ryan, is known as both an actor and Beyoncé’s stepfather, and his fame once saved his life. As thanks for signing an autograph, a fan upgraded Lawson’s plane ticket to first-class. The flight crashed and claimed the lives of over half the passengers on board: gruesomely, one of the victims had been sitting in the seat Lawson had originally booked. 

In the original film Dominique Dunne portrayed Dana Freeling, but she was prematurely taken from the world. Dunne’s ex-boyfriend took her life following an argument which her friend overheard. Some people believe this friend used the Poltergeist soundtrack to block out the argument, but that’s never been officially confirmed. It could just be rumors stemming from the film’s legendary curse.

Lou Perryman played Pugsley in the movie, where he was credited as Lou Perry. Unfortunately, he also had his life taken from him in 2009 in tragic circumstances. Although he rarely took center stage, Perryman still played instrumental roles in some big films including Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 and The Blues Brothers.

Heather O’Rourke’s passing is perhaps one of the more infamous happenings associated with Poltergeist. Young O’Rourke was just 12 when she lost her life in 1988 due to septic shock from a health condition. She’d not long finished filming the horror trilogy, so the popular movies stand as an unofficial tribute to her acting legacy.

Will Sampson, who portrayed a medicine man in Poltergeist II: The Other Side, was a real-life shaman who performed an on-set exorcism. Staff couldn’t climb a hill featuring a real-life skeleton-filled cave, which Sampson explained was because “the skeletons are not happy.” Writer Grais told The Daily Telegraph, “The next day, there was no problem... That’s absolutely a true story.” If you do the research, you’ll find it’s actually very common for scary incidents to occur on horror movie sets. And hearing about them somehow makes all these films even creepier...

Sometimes simply the act of researching for a movie is enough to throw up strange events. In the case of Vera Farmiga, star of The Conjuring, gathering online information resulted in a sinister discovery. The star recalled to regional newspaper Pittsburgh Post-Gazette how “digital claw marks” had inexplicably appeared on her computer screen.

But for Farmiga, things were to get a little more twisted. For one morning, after production had been wrapped, the actor woke up and noticed that a bruise had appeared on her thigh – accompanied with three mysterious scratches. Director James Wan also recalled how his dog had seemed to growl at an unexplained presence. And then there was the incident of a strange breeze surrounding members of the Perron family – the protagonists of the real-life haunting the movie is based on – when they visited the set. Weird.

The atmosphere of a well-made horror movie should be as unsettling as events themselves. Yet unfortunately, sometimes that very ambience can unnerve the cast and crew themselves. Such was the case during the making of Insidious. The 2010 movie was based in a hospital, making the fact that set workers often felt unwell during filming seem even more eerily coincidental.

In fact, crew workers on Insidious were struck down in unison in one particular incident that occurred in the basement of the Linda Vista Hospital, where the film was made. Staff were moving old patient records when all involved began to feel sick and heavy, needing to take a break as a result. Then there was the case of a buzzer inexplicably going off on occasion. After that, crew members formed groups to go into certain parts of the hospital. Chilling.

You have to admire the lengths that actors will go to successfully portray their character, no matter the demands. Often those demands are physical, but in the case of Jennifer Lawrence in Mother!, it was the psychological exertions that were the most intense. So much so that the actor retreated to the Kardashians for help. Not literally, though.

Lawrence spoke about filming Mother! on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “I had to do this one scene, I had never gone that dark before, so I started getting scared of myself a couple days beforehand and I was like… I need a tent, away from the extras, just because I didn’t know what I would do,” Lawrence revealed. “So in there I just had a computer playing the Kardashians,” the star added. Whatever it takes, Jen.

Audiences were certainly used to feeling terrorized watching 2016’s The Conjuring 2. Yet the crew of the movie were reportedly equally terrorized by an inanimate object that behaved in a rather spooky way during filming. “It was a huge curtain that went from the floor to the ceiling, which was just sort of waving violently, and there was no door open or no fan on; no nothing,” star Patrick Wilson later told entertainment wire WENN.

Clearly Wilson was pretty spooked out by the whole moving-curtain incident, as he had more to say about it. “That was a very, very odd occurrence because nothing else was moving around it and nothing else was blowing,” Wilson added. “It was pretty trippy,” the actor told WENN. Trippy enough to get a priest in to rid the set of negative energy, by all accounts.

If there are such things as ghosts, then some clearly have a sense of humor. During filming of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, star Jennifer Carpenter reported her radio switching itself on. One particular incident stayed with the actor as, not only was the music cranked up loud, but the song playing was Pearl Jam’s “Alive.” A nice touch.

According to Carpenter, her co-star Laura Linney also reported having a TV that acted up during filming. The star said her set would just inexplicably turn itself on and off, a fact that no doubt gave her the chills. By all accounts, Emily Rose was not the only one in need of an exorcism as these troublesome appliances reveal. Although at least any spirits involved had a good taste in music.

Psycho contains one of the most iconic horror scenes of all time in the shape of the knife attack in the shower. But little do most people know that the set of the movie was the scene of an equally upsetting real-life murder. The victim was star actor Janet Leigh’s body double, Myra Jones. And the perpetrator was a handyman – Kenneth Dean Hunt – who was also employed on the set.

What was Dean’s motive for the killing of Jones? Apparently, the murderer was obsessed with Psycho’s director – the legendary moviemaker Alfred Hitchcock. Dean claimed to the police to have been trying to impress Hitchcock with his actions. Hitchcock himself is said to have uttered the words “It appears we now have all the motivation we need to complete this film,” in response.

Ti West recalled to local newspaper The Litchfield County Times that he had found inspiration to write the movie The Innkeepers after the real-life experience of residing at an inn in Connecticut. West was filming The House of the Devil at the time and had his interest piqued by employees of The Yankee Pedlar Inn, who regaled the director with some of the happenings at the very same inn. “I don’t believe in ghosts, but weird sh–– did happen,” West would later tell Interview magazine.

West returned to The Yankee Pedlar Inn to film The Innkeepers. And now it was the movie director himself who would start to experience weird goings-on. “Lights have turned off and on by themselves in my room. My phone rang and no one was on the line, which the hotel staff says happens all the time,” West told Interview. “There are nights when I wake up in my room, and it feels like somebody is in there,” he added.

The Possession is a spine-tinglingly spooky horror movie directed by Ole Bornedal. It tells the story of a young girl who purchases an old antique box. Shockingly, she is then possessed by an evil spirit who inhabits that very same box. The story is based around the Jewish folk tale of the dybbuk: a similarly malicious spirit who inhabits living people. The legend was strong enough to leave many of the cast and crew uncertain.

Two of the movie’s actors – Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Natasha Calis – told website Gizmodo that they would stay well clear of the dybbuk box that is said to have been the inspiration behind The Possession. “There were some weird goings-on on set,” Morgan reported. “Lots of lightbulbs exploding. Just overall kind of creepiness… ‘Don’t mock the box,’ was sort of the mantra that we lived by while we were filming this,” the actor added.

Annabelle was made as a spinoff to The Conjuring, which itself was a movie that experienced its fair share of unexplained events behind the camera. And just like the movie that inspired it, Annabelle suffered from behind-the-scenes goings-on. As well as an incident involving a light fixture that exactly mimicked a death scene in the movie, director John Leonetti admitted that he believed the set to be haunted.

Leonetti recounted to entertainment magazine The Hollywood Reporter a freaky discovery made on location of Annabelle. “We went into the apartment where we were shooting, and in the transient window above the living room window. It was a full moon, and there were three fingers drawn through the dust along the window, and our demon has three fingers and three talons,” Leonetti recalled. “[The markings] were being backlit by the moon. I have a picture! It was sick,” the director also said.

Every now again you get a case of art imitating life. And that certainly seemed to be true in the making of Ghost of Goodnight Lane. The premise of the story is that an individual discovers a murdered co-worker in a film studio. The story was loosely based on events surrounding film sets that were supposedly haunted in real life. No one was quite sure if it was a good idea or not when director Alin Bijan made the decision to film his production on one of those very sets.

Bijan settled on a location that had seen no fewer than five deaths throughout its history. Unsurprisingly, that fact created a negative vibe among cast and crew, who were probably freaked out of their minds when there were unexplained electrical problems and falling fixtures. Star Billy Zane was also not the only set member who claimed to have heard their name being called by unidentified voices, either.

Special effects take care of most of the gory stuff you see in horror movies these days. But back in 1992, that wasn’t so much the case. Take the infamous “bee scene” from Candyman, for example. Actor Tony Todd literally had a mouthful of bees while shooting the scene in which a swarm buzzes out. Todd was smart enough to negotiate a $1,000 payout for each sting in his contract, however.

Director Bernard Rose later spoke about the guts Todd had shown to literally have live bees in his mouth. “All Tony had was a dental dam to prevent them going down his throat. He was very courageous – it’s such an unsettling and stunning image when the bees emerge from his mouth,” Rose told the U.K.’s The Guardian newspaper. Oh, and in case you’re interested, the actor felt the sting of an angry bee on 23 occasions, equating to quite a nice little bonus.

Part of being a great actor is being able to fully immerse yourself in the role you are playing. One performer who certainly took this to heart was Lupita Nyong’o, who played the character of Adelaide Wilson/Red in the 2019 horror flick Us. “She really kind of spooked me out a little bit,” co-star Shahadi Wright Joseph told entertainment website Buzzfeed News after filming wrapped.

Nyong’o decided not to drop her character between scenes so she could keep up the intensity and feeling of the role. “She would really get into character and wouldn’t talk. It was kind of creepy,” added her co-star Wright Joseph. It certainly worked as Nyong’o successfully scared the pants off audiences in most scenes that she starred in. Sounds like she freaked out the other stars too.

The Amityville Horror is a story based on real-life events. Those events have twice been made into films, and both versions have experienced behind-the-scenes quirks to say the least. Actor James Brolin is said to have accepted a part in the 1979 version only after a pair of his pants inexplicably dropped from a hanger just as he reached a scary section of the script. But if that can be classified as “strange,” then it is nothing compared to what went on in the 2005 remake.

Not long before the start of filming there was the small fact of a dead body washing up on the shore right on set. Then star Ryan Reynolds as well as other actors and crew members found themselves regularly awaking at 3:15 a.m. That, in itself, would be strange, but it just so turned out that 3:15 a.m. was a special time. The movie is based on a series of murders – and they happened at exactly that time.

Most of the events that happened behind the scenes of 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby can be put down to bad luck. Apparently, the entire cast were at one time struck down by food poisoning, for example, which no doubt led to some accusatory fingers being pointed at the on-site caterers. Meanwhile, a producer suffered a stroke and the film’s composer died as a result of a fall.

But if the catalogue of misdemeanors that occurred during and after shooting of the movie could be classified as “unlucky,” then events surrounding producer William Castle are just downright eerie. As legend has it, Castle received an anonymous note just days after production started, which claimed that he would “slowly rot during a long and painful illness.” And soon after, Castle indeed fell ill and required surgery on a medical complaint that troubled him for quite a while afterwards. Now that’s just weird.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaption of Stephen King’s The Shining is a tour de force of the horror genre. But there were plenty of scary goings on behind the camera too. Viewers might well remember the maze that features heavily in events toward the end of the movie. But what is less well known is that Kubrick himself got stuck in that very same maze. In the end, he had to be led out by crew members.

Attempting to film the maze sequences was hellish for all concerned too. The cold mist seen on screen was created by burning oil, resulting in a polluted atmosphere that was only worsened by the use of salt and Styrofoam to create the fake snow. With crew members also repeatedly getting lost in the maze, you can only imagine the collective sigh of relief that must have been heard when filming was wrapped.

The Omen was a terrifying piece of cinema, but events surrounding production of the film proved to be equally as frightening. In fact, The Omen must lay claim to having one of the eventful production periods of any movie ever made, starting with the tragic loss of star Gregory Peck’s son in a shooting accident before filming had even begun. Unfortunately, that was just a precursor to the things to come.

Things went from bad to worse for most of those involved in making The Omen. Peck’s plane was struck by lightning, as was that of Mace Neufeld, the executive producer. But most terrifying of all was a car accident involving John Richardson, the movie’s special effects designer. As a result, passenger Liz Moore was decapitated in an event chillingly reminiscent of a scene from the movie itself. Plus, the accident happened on Friday, August 13, 1976. That’s Friday the 13th.

William Friedkin’s 1973 work The Exorcist is one of the best-known horror movies of all time, causing many viewers a sleepless night or two. Yet it is interesting to know that events behind the scenes were often as spooky as those on it. Much of what happened was inspired by Friedkin himself, who wished to create a chilling atmosphere for the cast and crew members through actions such as making the set cold, playing scary music and even firing guns a random.

But some events behind the scenes of The Exorcist were less choreographed, leading to mentions of a “curse.” The main house featured in the film burnt down due to a kamikaze bird. Then star Ellen Burstyn acquired a back injury during filming. There were also a couple of cast and crew deaths in and around the release of the movie, which further perpetuated talk of the curse.

Some events behind movie productions are so notorious that they fundamentally change the industry. And so it was with Twilight Zone: The Movie, the 1983 big-screen version of the popular TV series. It was during the filming of director John Landis’s segment that a terrible helicopter crash occurred, killing three cast members, two of whom were child actors who had allegedly been given jobs outside the law.

The accident on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie led to litigation. Ultimately, the defendants, including the director Landis and the pilot, Dorcey Wingo, were cleared on involuntary manslaughter charges. Yet the consequences were profound. “The Twilight Zone accident created my job,” said Chris Palmer, a risk-management consultant, to Slate website. “It was a sea change in the movie industry. No one in risk management was ever on set before then,” Palmer added.