Poltergeist
Tobe Hooper’s “Poltergeist” is a movie I’m fairly certain I saw as a kid, but do not remember for sure if I had. Therefore, I came into this viewing like I would seeing any movie for the first time. In an October that has seen plenty of early ’80s horror cross my eyes, and a number of films from 1982 specifically do so, “Poltergeist” tops them all, as the director of “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and his producer, Steven Spielberg, create a haunted house thriller as intense as “The Shining” and “Hereditary,” but with optimism over the strength of family replacing the dark cynicism of those films. This is a brilliant use of clout and imagination from two of the key directors of a generation.
The Freeling family lives in a suburb in California much like the on Elliot and his family lived in in “E.T.,” and both families find themselves met with usual experiences that disrupt their everyday routine. With Elliot, it was a lost extra-terrestrial, with the Freelings, they find that something isn’t quite right in the house they’ve moved into. It’s not like they moved into an old house with an unsettling past- it’s a house right out of 1980s suburbia. But whatever is haunting them starts with their youngest kids, Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) and Robby (Oliver Robins), and not even their even-keeled dad, Steve (Craig T. Nelson), can soothe their fears at night. It’s not long before the terrors extend to stranger occurrences that lead them to call some paranormal experts to try and keep their sanity, and their family together.
While it doesn’t necessarily bother me to give spoilers to a decades-old film, in a case like “Poltergeist,” which derives its strength so much by what we discover along the way, keeping a bit of mystery for someone like me who hasn’t seen it in a while, or at all, is part of the experience. And the experience that Hooper delivers in this film is of a piece with the blunt-force trauma of his seminal 1974 classic; this film is every bit as tension-packed and brutal to watch, at times, as “Chain Saw Massacre,” and credit Spielberg in allowing Hooper to push the film to the brink while maintaining PG-rated content the whole way through. That collision of talent and voices has made the true auteurship of the film controversial over the years, but anyone who just watches this film can tell each shares equal credit for the film’s success.
The way a movie like “Poltergeist” becomes great is not just the vision of the people at the helm, but the people writing the story, and the people bringing it to life. The script for “Poltergeist” comes from Spielberg, Michael Grais and Mark Victor, the latter whom were introduced to Spielberg by Stephen King during the development process, and the way they build the characters, and the story, is critical to “Poltergeist” having the effect it needs to have when it comes to a “family in peril.” The Freelings are a family worth caring about- the parents and children genuinely love each other, and are worried when harm might come to them. Nelson and Jo Beth Williams as the parents are loving and affectionate towards one another, but also genuinely get into being parents, as well; the scene where Scott teaches Robby about thunder and lightning to try and calm him during thunderstorms, and Williams’s Diane getting excited about the paranormal events happening in her kitchen, say so much about these characters that, by the time they get to the real terror, we feel the emotional connection between everyone on an powerful level when they have to bring in Dr. Lesh (Beatrice Straight), a parapsychologist, and Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein), a spiritual medium, to help when Carol Anne goes missing in the house. This is a legitimately smart, tense, suspenseful thriller that says a lot about family going through a traumatic event, and delivers real scares with technical wizardry that is worth watching unfold. Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper made a masterpiece.
