– On a plane from LA to London, Gregory Peck’s plane was struck by lightning over the Atlantic.
– Weeks later, executive producer Mace Neufeld also left LA. Lightning struck this plane too, to which Neufeld says: “It was the roughest five minutes I’ve ever had on an airliner.”
– While producer Harvey Bernhard was in Rome, lightning just missed him.
– Rottweilers hired for the film attacked their trainers.
– A hotel at which director Richard Donner was staying got bombed by the IRA; he was also struck by a car.
– Peck cancelled another flight, to Israel, the plane he would have chartered crashed…killing all on board.
– On day one of the shoot, several principal members of the crew survived a head-on car crash.
– In Holland, on Friday, August 13th 1976, designer John Richardson was travelling with a female companion, Liz Moore. The car crashed, and when Richardson came to, he saw something rather chilling. Liz was dead, with injuries bearing an uncanny resemblance to the ones he had prepared for David Warner. As he looked out of the window though, the sight chilled him even more when he noticed a sign which had the distance to a dutch town, reading: Ommen, 66.6 km.
– The day after filming was completed at the Longleat Safari Park, a zookeeper was killed in the lion area, thereby fueling the sense of a curse on the film.
The Silver Screen Critic 