A Strange Incident During The Filming Of Titanic Caused Hysteria And Emotional Outbursts

The Titanic movie went down in history as a Hollywood masterpiece but it wasn’t always so popular. In fact, when the cast started to behave bizarrely, the film nearly didn’t hit box offices at all. The incident soon became so serious that people were hospitalized. And when the cast called in police to investigate the officers made a chilling discovery.

So what could’ve caused such strange reactions? Well, that depends on whom you ask. The more broad-minded among you may even whisper the words “curse.” We wouldn’t blame you for considering such an outlandish explanation, either. After all, Titanic isn’t the first movie to produce swirling rumors of angry spirits.

Take Poltergeist, for example — a series of misfortunes befell its cast and crew, including great tragedy. Some believe that the name Titanic carries a similar curse that strikes anyone and anything attached to it. Considering the fate of the allegedly “unsinkable” ship, then, were the events behind the movie proof of malicious supernatural intent?

In fact, a month after the Titanic sank, The Washington Post printed a conspiracy theory about how an Egyptian mummy’s curse had followed one of the passengers aboard and doomed everyone on the ship. In truth, though, the alleged remains were never in contact with the Titanic and instead remained in London — but the story reached newspapers nevertheless.

Of course, if all the horror hearsay’s too much for you, there are other explanations. The police were involved after the incident during the filming of Titanic, so was foul play involved? Perhaps you’re thinking it was a Hollywood party gone wrong. This wasn’t the first big challenge that the cast and crew faced, either. The Titanic movie was actually close to being a disaster many times during filming.

That wasn’t for the lack of trying, though. James Cameron proved many times over how dedicated he was to creating period-specific authenticity. Heck, he even went as far as filming the shipwreck of the real Titanic to make sure his model replica was accurate. Yet despite the cast receiving expert etiquette coaching for 1910s behavior, critics still spotted mistakes that slipped through the cracks.

Illness also plagued the stars, though of course the logical explanation was that they were being exposed to copious amounts of cold water. Flu and colds were common and a few people also suffered from kidney infections. Leading lady Kate Winslet was among those hit the hardest and the shoot had to be extended by more than three weeks to cope with cast sickness.

As if suffering during the bizarre dinner incident and being stricken by illness wasn’t enough, Winslet was also injured during the shoot. “I chipped a small bone in my elbow,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. “And at one point I had deep bruises all over my arms. I looked like a battered wife.”

So how did Cameron fare during filming? He suffered during the mysterious dinner as well, after all. And before that he didn’t have a great experience, either. Some of that’s possibly because of Cameron’s directing style, which is considered extreme. Winslet suggested as much when she described filming conditions during Titanic.

When Winslet discussed the scene where she was caught in the sinking Titanic, she revealed that she’d been wearing a heavy coat that restricted her movement. She recalled, “I had to sort of shimmy out of the coat to get free. I had no breath left. I thought I’d burst. And Jim said, ‘Ok, let’s go again.’ That was his attitude.”

Did the actress say anything to Cameron? “I didn’t want to be a wimp, so I didn’t complain,” she elaborated. Other members of the crew came forward to criticize the director, too, including Sebastian Silver, the first assistant director. He responded to rumors of tough shooting conditions when talking out to the Los Angeles Times in 1997.

Silver admitted, “[Cameron’s] a man on a mission and it’s either his way or the highway. I respect him a lot in the sense that he goes out and gets what he wants. But he’s a hard person to work for. Let’s face it — we were top-dollar slaves.”

Later that year, Cameron responded to all the accusations. “My manner on the set’s intense,” he acknowledged. “And I never give up until I know the scene is the best it can be. I ask people to rise to my level of commitment every single day.” Pretty much everyone involved in the production was stressed, perhaps in part because the Titanic movie itself seemed to be sinking even before its release.

The original budget, which was apparently set at $110 million, was doubled. Filming time was stretched from six months to eight, and tensions ran high. Production assistant Bertha Medina — who had a car accident during the shoot after a long work day — revealed, “You felt like you were part of the Titanic, like a survivor.”

“If anything, the fault of the movie is just its sheer size,” Silver added. “It was just so huge; there was no way to control it. Sometimes I’d find some of the 1,000 extras sleeping in the weirdest places, under the stacks of the ship.” So, did this have an effect on Cameron’s behavior, too?

“If anything was the slightest bit wrong, he would lose it,” Winslet said of Cameron. “It was hard to concentrate when he was losing it, shouting and screaming. Logistically, it was a very tough film, for him as much as anyone. By the end, I was existing on four hours sleep a day, but Jim was existing on three.”

So people were already under a lot of pressure and acting strange — but the worst was yet to come. On the last scheduled evening of shooting in Canada the cast and crew gathered en masse for a midnight lunch, which just goes to show how stretched Titanic schedules were. The meal was an event to remember, though not in the positive way everyone intended.

Many people attended and director Cameron appeared at the party, too! Yet it wasn’t long before things got out of hand. At first, it was like nothing had happened. But 15 minutes later something started to take hold, which led to the behavior going from strained to strange. And the situation continued to escalate.

In 1996 the late Bill Paxton — who played Brock Lovett in Titanic — told Entertainment Weekly, “The crew was all milling about. Some people were laughing, some people were crying, some people were throwing up.” And whatever had gripped those present was having the strangest influences on them.

“One minute I felt okay, the next minute I felt so goddamn anxious I wanted to breathe in a paper bag,” Paxton continued. “Cameron was feeling the same way.” Cameron was actually wounded in the incident, too. He described how a crew member struck him with a pen. “I’m sitting there bleeding and laughing,” the director recalled.

Standby painter Marilyn McAvoy recounted her own experience of the event to VICE in 2017. “Everyone seemed confused. Everyone was having trouble getting their work done,” she explained. “I needed some stuff upstairs as well as some other equipment down in another area. And I remember just walking around trying to figure out the best way to get my supplies.”

“Things just seemed fuzzy,” McAvoy continued. “For me, the whole situation was pretty surreal. But in terms of effects, it was kind of like a combination of being high on marijuana and being drunk. I was functioning, I was reading magazines. It was like a dream.” Hardly anyone was functioning properly, though.

Even in her fugue state, McAvoy knew something was amiss. And part of her was attempting to solve the mystery by observing her colleagues. “While I was trying to figure out what was going on, everyone else seemed to be going outside,” she recalled. “They were all gathering outside of the giant doors of the building we were working in.”

But what could’ve caused such bizarre behavior? Well, Cameron thought it might’ve been the food. Caterers had served up a clam chowder for lunch. So, was food poisoning a possible cause? According to McAvoy, there was nothing wrong with the meal. In fact, if anything it tasted too good — people couldn’t keep away.

“The chowder was unbelievable. People were going back for second bowls. I really thought about going back because it was so good,” Mcvoy told VICE. “And I think that was part of the problem. People ate a lot more than usual because it was so delicious.” Cameron and Paxton had another theory, though.

During a 2015 appearance on Larry King Now, Paxton stated, “I knew I was pretty stoned on something pretty bad. And me and Jim [Cameron] thought there was a neurotoxin in the clams. We didn’t know what it was. We thought maybe the clams had been left out in the sun or whatever.”

So Cameron made himself throw up, just in case. On the other hand, Paxton stood observing the madness around him and went down another route. “I said, ‘Jim, I’m not gonna hang out here, this is bedlam,’” he recalled. “‘I’m gonna… wander back down to the set and just drink a case of beer.’ That seemed to help me.”

Paxton wasn’t the only one who came to the conclusion they were under the influence, either. McAvoy concurred that this was the only possible explanation. “It became pretty chaotic,” she admitted. “Some people were having a really hard time. I think maybe the people who had more experience with drugs were having flashbacks and bad trips.”

“I was pretty scared because I had no experience to base [this high] on,” McAvoy continued. “We didn’t know then what it’d been spiked with. But because it was such an unexpected thing to have happened, I didn’t have time at the moment to fully take in how dangerous something like this could have been.”

And as it turns out, Paxton and McAvoy were right. Someone had dosed the clam chowder with an unidentified drug but the victims couldn’t have guessed what. It was only when the police launched an investigation into the incident that they revealed what the mysterious substance was. The cast and crew had been tripping hard on angel dust, or PCP.

Though the perpetrator was still unidentified, the spiked Titanic employees were the more immediate concern. McAvoy recalled, “The crew vans came and picked everybody up and took us to the Dartmouth General Hospital. En masse, we went through these hospital doors at 1:00 a.m. in the morning. They did not know what to do with us. It became pretty chaotic.”

“Well, we were there all night,” McAvoy elaborated. “Eventually, we all got put in these cubicles with the curtains around us, but no one wanted to stay in their cubicles. Everyone was out in the aisles and jumping into other people’s cubicles. People had a lot of energy.” The chaos spilled out into the hospital proper, too.

McAvoy continued, “Some were in wheelchairs, flying down the hallways. I mean, everyone was high! So they gave us this drink that had charcoal in it, to remove the toxins. By sun-up, we had started to come down. People were playing hacky sack. Everyone just wanted to get home.” So, how did all this affect filming?

The cast and crew were all professionals and they were on a tight schedule. “We had to go home and get right to sleep and then back to work that night to finish the shooting that’d been interrupted,” McAvoy explained. The ultimate question remained unanswered, though: who was responsible for spiking the clam chowder in the first place?

Actually, that’s still a mystery to this day. At the time of the incident, Sergeant Sgt. Richard Hollinshead of Halifax police told Entertainment Weekly, “Whether it was any specific crew member or persons or the entire crew that was targeted, we don’t know yet. We’re not even sure if it was a prank or a mistake. We’re still investigating.”

But police found no trace of the culprit and no suspects were ever confirmed. As you’d expect, though, there’ve been many theories over the years. Some people pointed the finger at the catering staff — they had the easiest access to the food, after all. On the other hand, a caterer blamed the cast.

Earle Scott, who was the CEO of the catering company during filming, told Entertainment Weekly, “It was the Hollywood crowd bringing in the psychedelics… I don’t think it was purposefully done to hurt somebody. It was done like a party thing that got carried away.” Cameron informed Variety that he didn’t think the crew were behind the issue, though.

But this isn’t to say that Cameron wasn’t without his suspicions. According to Vanity Fair, the director said, “We had fired a crew member the day before because they were creating trouble with the caterers. So we believe the poisoning was this idiot’s plan to get back at the caterers, whom of course we promptly fired the next day. So it worked.”

Whatever the truth behind it, the incident’s become something of a legend among film buffs — and an experience that the Titanic cast and crew will never forget. “It made me realize how fragile, and how delicate, these things can be,” McAvoy admitted. “Had I gone back for that second bowl, I might’ve had an entirely different kind of experience.”