A contagious curse is a prolific horror trope, one typically defined by victims being able to accidentally catch a curse. Like a cold. Movies like Smile, The Ring, Drag Me to Hell, The Grudge, and It Follows come to mind.

Every time I turn on The Wizard of Oz (which is fairly often), I end up in a rabbit hole trying to remind myself how the filmmakers pulled off such a realistic tornado in 1939. Seriously, if you haven’t seen it in a while, pull up a clip on YouTube. The Wizard of Oz was the first film to show a tornado on screen, which ended up being one of the largest expenses of the film’s budget. The studio actually didn’t recoup the cost of the movie until it re-released it a decade afte