Twilight Zone The Movie Onset Tragedy

Film star Vic Morrow and two child actors were killed on set when a disoriented stunt pilot crashed a helicopter into them. In 1982, Warner Bros. had high hopes for their big-screen remake of the classic TV series The Twilight Zone. The plan was to tell four separate stories — each directed by a different director — and they’d landed top directors Steven Spielberg and John Landis to helm two of them. Landis’s segment was about a racist white man played by 61-year-old Vic Morrow, who gets zapped through history into the lives of persecuted people of color. He finds himself being hunted by Nazis in Germany, chased by the Klan in the South, and then fleeing US soldiers in Vietnam. Horrifically, while shooting the Vietnam segment on the last day of production, Morrow and two child actors, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, died when a stunt helicopter pilot, disoriented by pyrotechnics, crashed atop the actors. Despite the horrific tragedy, a decision was made to finish the film and put it o