Abby

Since my experience I've heard a lot of strange things have happened during the making of certain Horror Films - The Exorcist, The Crow, The Omen and Poltergeist - such as members of the Cast and Crew dying and becoming ill, fires on the set, burns and horrid reactions from the audience such as being sick, fainting and one known miscarriage. Also a few deaths on the sets during filming where one man was shot with a gun that was firing blanks (the metal casing had fired off the gun accidently and hit him in his stomach) another stunt included an explosion where a piece of debris accidently caught the stunt coordinator in the head and he later died in hospital.

Rumors state that 4-9 members of the team died during the making of The Exorcist. 4-9 is a pretty big gap but let's just say up to 9 people were obviously injured and 4 out of those 9 definitely died.

Also a few deaths, similar than those what happened in the movies, happened also, the special effects director for The Omen was involved in a crash with his girlfriend where she was beheaded, just like David Warmer in the film...

Anyway my story isn't as bad as these, but what happened did freak me out!

Back in 2004 I started a two year college course in Graphic Design, most of our 'projects' included poster design, packaging design, DVD covers and special effects etc... In our final year we had to do a Final Major Project (FMP), I chose to make my own film trailer complete with billboard poster, DVD cover, and advertisement poster. The genre of my film... Horror.

After a bit of research on Horror films I decided (in my opinion) kids were the scariest/creepiest to use as the main character. My friend's daughter (Abbie) at the time was 5 so I got permission off my friend and decided to use her for my project. I went round to their house after buying a long plain white dress, we covered it in dirt and fake blood, back-combed Abbie's hair and did her make-up so she looked pale and gaunt, we even darkened her eyes. The pictures I took were really spooky! She transformed from cute Abbie to evil Abby (which is what I decided to call my film). For a child so young she took it very seriously and we got some evil looking pictures. I was happy and used most of them throughout my project.

I used the scariest picture we had for my poster and DVD cover and uploaded all of the pictures on the computer in college. I searched through the fonts to find one to suit a horror film and had no luck. I was given the name of a website where we could download fonts for free - and finally found one that fitted in perfectly.

At the top of the poster in large red font with a dark drop shadow I typed 'Abby' then in smaller white writing 'The Legend Never Dies'. It took me a few weeks to get the poster and DVD cover to look how I wanted it to and we also filmed the trailer around the college.

Towards the last couple of days I logged on to my computer as normal and opened up the poster file but something wasn't right. I was really spooked... Where I'd written 'Abby' in the installed font, now read 'KILL 9' in big capital letters. One of my friends who was sat next to me looked over as I laughed nervously and said 'what the... Is that?' He thought I had changed the name on purpose and was winding him up. I for a second thought someone had logged into my account and had done it as a joke. I deleted the text and typed in ABBY - no good, it began to type out KILL 9. Again I deleted this and asked my friend to type it... KILL 9 again.

Now I know you might be thinking surely if it were to type something it would be KIIL (with two I's because of the two B's in Abby) but that was the strange thing, it didn't and where the 9 came from I will never know.

We closed the file down and re-opened it, and as though it had never happened read the title ABBY again.

I haven't got a clue as to why it did this but it was really strange. Nothing else ever happened during the time I was working on my FMP but I was just curious as to why that happened - out of all the things to say, KILL 9 had to come up?