16 Facts You Didn’t Know About ‘Ghost,’ 35 Years After It Came Out

Ghost is celebrating its 35th anniversary!

After it hit theaters on July 13, 1990, the movie went on to win three awards at the 1991 Academy Awards.

On paper, the ghost story sounds like it should have been a niche film. But combining the romance, thriller and comedy genres into a single movie turned out to be a formula for success for its leads.

The surprise summer hit raised the profiles of stars Demi Moore, Patrick Swayze and Whoopi Goldberg and had fans across the country humming “Unchained Melody.” (It could not be determined if the film also caused an uptick in enrollment in pottery classes, but would it surprise you if it did?)

In honor of the film’s 35th anniversary, here are 16 things you may not know about the classic hit — which might make you love it even more.

It was the highest-grossing film of 1990

Worldwide, the film raked in a whopping $505.7 million, beating even that other 1990 hit, Home Alone, which made $476.6 million. Apparently, love can conquer not only death but also slapstick action comedies about little kids brutalizing burglars.

Moore wasn’t sure it would be a hit

Speaking at a 2013 American Film Institute event honoring the film, Moore said she loved the script but wasn’t sure audiences would respond to it.

“It’s a love story, and it’s a guy – a dead guy – trying to save his wife, and there is a comedy part, but really, really it’s a love story, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is really a recipe for disaster … It’s either going to be something really special, really amazing, or really an absolute bust,’ ” she said.

Swayze called the pottery scene “the sweetest, sexiest love scene that I’ve ever been involved with”

Why? In an interview, he explained that it wasn’t about physical love as much as it was a deep personal connection.

“We were very passionate about not having the love scene be about sucking face and jumping each other’s bones, but the connection between two human beings,” he explained.

Filming certain scenes gave Swayze flashbacks to the grief he felt over his father’s death eight years earlier

Speaking to PEOPLE in 1990, Swayze said that seeing the plaster dummy representing his character’s body took him back to his dad’s funeral, when he almost passed out from the shock of touching his father’s body as it lay in its coffin.

“I had pushed that memory out of my life until that moment on location when it all came back, big time,” he said. “There were a few scenes where something happened to me that was very scary.”

Swayze said Ghost revitalized his career

The downside of the success of Dirty Dancing was that Swayze had found himself typecast. That changed after Ghost, but director Jerry Zucker told PEOPLE that his roles in films such as Roadhouse made him reluctant to even consider Swayze as the male lead.

However, Swayze’s reading of the film’s farewell scene changed Zucker’s mind.

“We all had tears in our eyes, right there in the office – and we knew how it ends,” the director said. “I saw a side of Patrick that I never knew existed.”

Bruce Willis turned down the opportunity to play opposite his then-wife

Calling himself a “knucklehead” for saying no, Bruce Willis told The New York Times reporter David Sheff in 1996 that he didn’t think Ghost would work.

“I just didn’t get it. I said, ‘Hey, the guy’s dead. How are you gonna have a romance?’ Famous last words,” he joked.

Willis later played a thematically similar role in The Sixth Sense.

Goldberg was initially told she wasn’t right for the part of Oda Mae

In a 1990 Associated Press interview, Goldberg said she loved the part, but when she expressed interest in playing the psychic Oda Mae, she was told the producers wanted an unknown for the role.

Six months later, producers circled back to her and offered her the role.

Goldberg made history when she won Best Supporting Actress for her role in the movie

Goldberg had previously been nominated in 1986 for Best Actress for her role in The Color Purple. She didn’t win, but she did become the first Black actress nominated for both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories.

It also marked her first win toward her EGOT, which she completed in 2002 with her Tony Award for Thoroughly Modern Millie.

It’s one of the few supernatural-themed films nominated for Best Picture

Traditionally, movies about ghosts and the like don’t get Oscar nominations. Ghost is an exception, however, even if it lost to Dances with Wolves.

Just one year earlier, there was another outlier: the fantasy baseball movie Field of Dreams. Other spooky movies nominated for Best Picture include The Exorcist and The Sixth Sense.

Tony Goldwyn got some hate for his role as the film’s villain

Tony Goldwyn recalled to the A.V. Club in 2014 that his role as the conniving, murderous Carl prompted a waitress to refuse to serve him.

He couldn’t figure out why she was shooting him death stares until she finally asked him if he was an actor. “She said, “I’m so sorry! I knew I hated you, but I didn’t know where from, and because I couldn’t place who you were,’ ” Goldwyn said.

There’s a surprising reason the film’s love theme is titled “Unchained Melody”

Have you ever wondered why the song is called “Unchained Melody”? It was actually written for the 1955 prison film Unchained.

In that film, it’s sung by an inmate. That’s why the lyrics note how hard it is to wait for so long — because the narrator is serving time.

Following the movie’s release, the song went No. 1 in Australia and as high as No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100.

There was a stage adaptation of Ghost

The Ghost stage adaptation kicked off in England in 2011 and hit Broadway in 2012. And yes, it features “Unchained Melody,” in addition to many new numbers.

There was a sex-flipped Japanese remake

Released in 2010, Ghost: In Your Arms Again has the wife going all Casper and attempting to reunite with her husband from beyond. And yes, there’s a pottery scene.

It inspired pottery scenes for years to come

Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley parodied the pottery scene in the second Naked Gun movie — and in all honesty, it’s probably how real-life re-creations of the scene probably turned out.

But homages, parodies and callbacks have appeared in many works, perhaps most notably in 2014 in a scene starring Moore’s real-life ex, Ashton Kutcher.

The filmmakers used the sounds of babies crying to make a scary noise

In the film, the bad people go to a bad afterlife, and they’re taken there by creepy, inky shadow things.

They’re scary enough to make anyone walk a more righteous path, but the ick factor increases when you know that the horrible noise they make is actually the noise of a baby crying — played slow and backwards, according to IMDb.

Ghost prompted Swayze to share some life lessons that seem all the more poignant since his passing.

Swayze died of pancreatic cancer in 2009 at age 57.

Speaking to PEOPLE in 1990, Swayze shared what he felt was the message of the film, saying, “Ghost was about living your life for the moment, because that’s all you’ve got … If you don’t communicate with the people you love, you set yourself up for incredible pain if you lose them.”