"Poltergeist" has terrified audiences since its release 35 years ago this week, on June 4, 1982. And not just for the on-screen depiction of vengeful spirits haunting the Freeling family's new suburban home, but also for the eerie events that notoriously took place off-screen as well.

Here are the production's scary secrets, including the truth behind the so-called "Poltergeist" curse that supposedly plagued the ill-fated cast.
1. Much has been made of Oliver Robins, who played middle child Robbie Freeling, has said that all the direction of the actors' performances was done by Hooper. Nonetheless, after Hooper submitted his cut of the film, he withdrew from the production, and Spielberg finished the post-production (editing, music, and effects). The Directors Guild of America launched an investigation, but Spielberg insisted that Hooper deserved sole credit on the film.
6. Spielberg was literally hands-on during the scene where Marty (Martin Casella) rips his own face off (above). The effect was accomplished with a model bust of the actor's head, but he was nervous about handling the only bust the production had, so those are Spielberg's own hands you see tearing at Marty's flesh.
7. The tree that nearly swallows Robbie was actually four trees, built by the prop department, each with different moving or robotic parts. One of the filming has it that the tree disgorged Robbie, rather than sucking him in, but the sequence was filmed backward so that it would look even scarier when run forward.
8. The stacking-chair effect was done in-camera, without cuts. When the camera panned away from the unstacked chairs, crew rushed to replace them with a pre-stacked set of chairs before the camera panned back.
9. The collapsing-house effect at the end started with what producer Frank Marshall called "the $250,000 sentence," a four-word description in Spielberg's script that read: "And the house implodes."

10. The implosion was accomplished using a six-foot model house with cables attached to the sides and a vacuum mounted beneath the floor. As the cables pulled the walls down and the vacuum sucked up the debris, a camera filmed the destruction at 300 frames per second, more than 12 times normal speed. The first time the footage was played back at a standard 24 frames per second, the sight of the slowly disintegrating house made even the studio projectionist gasp. Spielberg reportedly preserved the crushed fragments of the model in a display case atop his piano.
11. Two of the stars claimed to have had otherworldly experiences during the "Poltergeist" shoot. Poltergeist III," and that a stunt double had to complete her scenes. Her family claimed she'd long since finished shooting when she died, but director Gary Sherman said that the 1988 film had to be rewritten to accommodate her absence.
17. Williams has claimed that the muddy skeletons she writhed among during the "Poltergeist" swimming pool sequence were real, that Spielberg had used them not to get a Method scare out of the actress, but because they were supposedly cheaper than artificial ones.
18. It's possible that it was "Poltergeist II" that used real skeletons. In fact, that creepy detail supposedly led Sampson to perform an after-hours exorcism on the set, to dispel bad karma. Guess it didn't take.