Poltergeist (1982)

              I wasn’t originally going to write about ‘Poltergeist’ this month since I’m trying to avoid movies I’ve already seen (so no ‘The Sixth Sense’), but it’s been forever since I saw it last and I’ve never really dug into the movie in any meaningful way. I also doubt I have anything to say about such an influential film that hasn’t already been said, which also made me hesitant. Originally I had the 1982 movie ‘The Entity’ penciled in for this slot, but then my new policy of skimming the plot synopsis proved useful once again and I scratched it off the list. I don’t really feel like writing about a movie that’s wall-to-wall demonic sexual assault. So Craig T. Nelson it is!

              Might as well address the whole Tobe Hooper / Steven Spielberg debate while we’re right here at the beginning. After watching this movie and taking notes I have never been less interested in answering the question “Who directed ‘Poltergeist.’” I’m not interested in what DGA bylaws have to say about assigned directorial credit, I don’t need to read the daily logs to see who was on set and who wasn’t. I’m sure in the technical sense of the word that Hooper was the director of the movie, but if you want to talk about who the author of the movie was it’s clearly Spielberg. It was his idea, his script, very likely his storyboarding, and I have no doubt that several sequences were directly laid out by him, even if he wasn’t the one on set calling ‘action.’

              ‘Poltergeist’ is about ghosts in the same way that ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ is about archeology, true in a technical sense but certainly not the point of the movie. Of course the actual Spielberg movie to talk about in conjunction with this one is ‘E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.’ They were in production at the same time and opened in theaters a week apart. Even the basic plots run parallel: a happy suburban family’s existence is intruded upon by an otherworldly presence, placing stresses on their relationships but ultimately bringing them closer together. One’s sci-fi and one’s horror but the two movies could easily coexist in the same world.

              Countless books and documentaries have tried, but it’s really hard to convey to modern movie audiences how monumental an impact Steven Spielberg has had on mainstream films over the past forty-odd years. He’s not alone in this, among the class of film-school students who absolutely rolled the film industry in the late 70’s and early 80’s there’s people like Lucas and Scorsese, but none of them were as consistently commercially successful as him. Lucas had ‘Star Wars,’ of course, and he was involved in the Indiana Jones movies, but despite too many shameless rip-offs to count space adventures did not suddenly change everything about movies. You know what did? Family films. Adventures movies that were for general audiences. Skillfully crafted genre works. A lot’s been made about how Wall Street money flowing into the industry fundamentally changed how movies were made, but these investors weren’t artists in their own rights. They didn’t care what got made so long as it made money, and Spielberg made money.

              And I need to be careful here, because I’m getting close to wandering down the resentful path of so many self-described film buffs before me, angrily shaking my fist at the popular entertainments. The films Spielberg directed and produced made money for a reason, and that reason is because so many of them were fucking amazing. Do not come in here expecting insults against this man to be tolerated, he directed ‘Jaws,’ ‘Jurassic Park,’ ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ he produced ‘Gremlins,’ ‘Men in Black,’ and ‘Tiny Toon Adventures.’ The thing about Spielberg that the people who decry his influence on the medium conveniently forget is that he is possibly the most naturally talented visual storyteller of modern times. There has never been anyone as good as Spielberg when he’s operating at his peak. It drives a lot of people nuts that so much of the time he’s chosen to use those talents on material they deem unworthy.

              The difference in style between this movie and the ones I’ve been watching up to this point could not be starker. The shots are just as long but the camera movement is so much more fluid. Scenes can wander from place to place, multiple people moving in the frame, conversational crosstalk happening over blocking changes, actors having constant business to do, yet it never descends into chaos. Each scene has a point and it’s conveyed through staging and framing as much as it is by dialogue. Here’s a great example: in the opening scene the camera follows the family dog at night. It moves from the living room through the ground floor and upstairs, poking its head in each bedroom. This sequence tells us a bunch of things with no dialogue: first it tells us that a friendly dog is in the movie, always good. Next it lets us know that this is a house in the suburbs and from the clutter scattered around that a family lives there. It teaches us the geography of the house, letting us know where everything is in relation to everything else, information that will be very useful later on. As we look into the rooms we see posters on the walls, toys on the floor, it clues us into the personalities of the characters we’ll be spending time with. Then it ends by focusing on the young daughter of the family, and the spookiness starts.

              Something that Spielberg definitely didn’t invent but that he popularized was overlapping dialogue and more realistic interpersonal dynamics. I’m pretty sure one of the most influential movie moments of the past half-century was in ‘E.T.’ when Elliott called his sister “penis-breath” and their mother involuntarily laughed while scolding him. That’s simply a level of psychological complexity in popular entertainment that a lot of genre films weren’t providing. I really liked ‘The Changeling,’ and it was trying to do something completely different than this film, but after watching ‘Poltergeist’ everything about that movie now seems so ponderous. Static scenes of characters reciting lines at each other, only conveying one clear emotion at a time, long lock-down shots as people wander across rooms. Again, it worked for the kind of movie it was and what it was trying to do, both of where were very different from this film, since an important thing that I realized while watching ‘Poltergeist’ is that it isn’t really a ghost movie.

              Now we swing back around to ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ because what that did for adventure movies this one did for horror movies. It upped the realism of the characters and did away with any attempt at subtext or subtlety. There are themes in ‘Poltergeist,’ sure, about the importance of family, the dangers of unchecked progress, that sort of thing, but what it’s really about is showing you lots of spooky ghosts, a bunch of stuff flying around a room, and a big fleshy hell mouth of some sort. Industrial Light and Magic really cut its teeth on this one, and while a lot of the effects haven’t entirely held up they’re not embarrassing. I really liked the cancerous counter steak.

Listen, I'm sure building there will be fine.

              Up to this point ghost movies certainly wanted to scare you, but they also traded in implication and ambiguity. Was the ghost good or evil? What happened in their past that caused them to stick around? Often the main character has some kind of recent grief or trauma that somehow evokes the spirits to make contact, or they’ve moved into a new house or building and there’s some kind of connection. ‘Poltergeist’ doesn’t care about any of that nonsense, we see a spectral hand reaching out of a tv and chairs stacking themselves on tables within the first half hour and it only escalates from there. You don’t need implication when you have a massive FX budget. There’s no recently dead grandpa worrying the kids or buried trauma that opens anyone up to spiritual influence, the closest it comes is a dead bird in the opening few minutes that’s more or less played as a joke. You’d think we’d get an insert shot of a little zombie bird hopping around at some point, but maybe that was too complicated for ILM.

              Something I forgot about this movie is how once it gets going it just barrels forward and escalates way faster than you’d expect. There’s some token resistance from some in the family to the idea that it’s ghosts, wondering about new scientific principles or just energy we can’t understand, then at 37 minutes in a tree comes to life and crashes through a window to snatch a kid and his sister is eaten by a closet. This movie moves. They’ve got a team of researchers in there by 45 minutes in and fan-favorite Zelda Rubenstein arrives with a full 40 minutes left in the movie. Heck, they rescue their daughter from the astral plane or whatever with 25 minutes to go. The pacing is amazing, it has two separate ramp-ups to climactic action and then that final barn-burning finale.

              Let’s examine just one of the scares, that fucking clown doll. Nothing in this movie still reads as scary to me with the exception of that damn doll. It’s first shown in the background of a scene where one of the kids gets scared by the spooky old tree looming outside his bedroom window. The doll’s just on a chair as the mom walks by, hanging out. Its presence is underlined a few minutes later when we get our first good look at it as the kid stares at him during a rainstorm, shooting finger guns towards it in a clearly vain attempt to feel less scared. He even takes the very sensible step of throwing a jacket over it. Then, during the tree attack scene, it’s not emphasized but the clown doll is in bed with the little girl as things start to get sucked into the closet. It gets drawn in with everything else, and then it’s out of the movie for most of the rest of the running time. Long enough that you kind of forget about it. Then at 96 minutes it’s back in the kids’ room hanging out in the background again, just off to one side of the frame. By this point the daughter has been rescued, Zelda’s declared that the house is now clean, but the audience is starting to shift uneasily as they’re realizing that this epilogue is running a bit long. Then a couple of minutes later the kid’s back in bed, again freaked out by the clown, and again tries to toss something over it, but this time he misses. And the camera lingers on one of its arms flopping down to swing loosely and a small bell atop his little clown hat waving back and forth. It’s moving on its own. The kid has used up his savviness and tries to go to sleep, and after he gives up on that he sits back up while the camera holds on his face and turns with him to reveal the empty chair where the doll was sitting. The absence itself feels like an inevitability, the attack itself isn’t nearly as scary as the sight of that chair missing its clown.

              And that’s as subtle as the film gets, the rest of it is hunched screaming phantoms in front of doors and coffins exploding out of the ground as the house gets absorbed into the astral plane through a tear in the fabric of space.

              The characterization of the ghosts is interesting because the movie treats them mostly as an impersonal mass of malice. The dialogue mentions that there are individual spirits in there, they need to go into the light and all, but in a practical sense it’s just an omnipresent threat that can do almost anything if it looks decent on camera. We’ve got teleportation, electrical disturbances, all sorts of psychokinetic movements, ectoplasmic goopiness, objects coming to life, one person claws all the special effects makeup off of what is clearly a fake head, they can basically do whatever Hooper and Spielberg can think up. They also don’t seem to want anything specific. Zelda mentions that most of the spirits are just confused, they’re being corralled by something she calls The Beast, which is something that’s going to be super useful for the sequel but doesn’t do much for us here.

Up there with the Wheelers from 'Return to Oz.'

              In the end it’s revealed that the ghosts are pissed off because the subdivision the family’s living in was built over an old graveyard that wasn’t moved properly. As one character screams at another during the climax, “You moved the cemetery but you left the bodies!” Which from a historical perspective is kind of funny, if we had mass ghost explosions every time a sacred site was desecrated in this country we could harness them all for a clean energy revolution. Luckily they didn’t go with the ol’ Indian Burial Ground thing, these are apparently people from a few decades ago who are annoyed at the sound of people walking overhead. What were these spirits doing before the subdivision was built anyways, just lying in the ground refusing to pass into the light? They should be grateful for all the development, they must have been so bored just buried in rows next to each other, tormenting this family is at least something to do.

              Nobody tries to do any historical research, nobody tries to make contact, the way the daughter is rescued isn’t by holding a séance or going into some kind of trance, it’s by tying a rope to the mom and having her hop into the dimensional rift to physically carry her daughter back out. This is a very mechanistic treatment of ghosts. The moment that I think encapsulates it best is during the first night with the paranormal researchers, after they’ve set up their equipment to run on automatic and most everyone has fallen asleep. The tech that was supposed to mind the cameras has gotten distracted so doesn’t notice when one of them detects movement and slowly swings around to focus on the head of the stairs. There’s a shot of the measuring devices going crazy and the soundtrack is soft woodwinds under mechanical clicks and beeps. There’s this incredible shot of the front of camera where the face and the lens itself are mostly in focus but the inside of the camera isn’t, then there’s a soft whirr as the mechanical parts inside pull forward to snap into clear focus in the middle of the frame, clearly tracking something coming into the room. That’s kind of a thesis statement for the movie as a whole, a precise clockwork apparatus for capturing spooky imagery on film.

              Of course there’s so much more to talk about with this film. Like the influence of Spielberg already being so big in Hollywood that the movie is just littered with brand names and recognizable action figures. They paid for the rights, correctly thinking this would make the movie feel more grounded in reality. The kids’ rooms are lousy with Star Wars toys and ‘Alien’ movie posters, the adults drink recognizable beer brands, and at the end the family is staying in a Holiday Inn. The movie opens with a tv playing the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ as it ends its broadcast day, then the tv switches to snow, which is both a plot point and something so culturally pervasive at the time that the movie doesn’t feel the need to explain it. I grew actively annoyed while watching this scene at the knowledge that this is something that will probably need to be explained to modern and future audiences, which I claim is the unstoppable march of time’s problem and not mine. Some adult builders catcall a fifteen-year-old girl while her mom smiles indulgently in the background. Characters smoke and drink constantly. Oddly enough the thing that’s probably aged the best is a scene that was controversial at the time, the parents getting high and fooling around after putting the kids to bed.

              ‘Poltergeist’ is a pretty great film, but you didn’t need me to tell you that. It got a remake that was rightfully ignored and hopefully I don’t have another handful of films fall through forcing me to add that to the list. It spawned a couple of lesser sequels and has been folded into the canon of 80’s films along with ‘The Goonies’ and ‘Back to the Future’ (guess who has producer credit on those?). I’m curious how much impact this had on the movies I still have coming up on my list, although I’m going to guess it’ll be minimal considering how many of them are straight horror movies without the budget and influence of a Spielberg behind them. An internet search for “movies like poltergeist” just turns up a lot of mainstream horror flicks, the only one I’d call even close in sensibilities being ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street.’ Tobe Hooper’s next movie after this was ‘Lifeforce,’ which didn’t actually help his defenders, while Spielberg’s was ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,’ and say what you want about that movie it’s better than goddamn ‘Lifeforce.’ I’d recommend this to anyone who wants a fun time, not so much if you’re wanting cerebral spookums this season.