Before Steven Spielberg hit him up to direct Poltergeist, Tobe Hooper's luck with films in the UK hadn't gone too well. Of the four films he had directed since the 1970s, one was practically considered the root of all evil, one was banned, and another was mistaken for a film with a similar name and banned by mistake. So despite the enduring theory that Spielberg directed far more of the film than Hooper, the simple fact that Poltergeist ended up being Hooper's most commercially successful film (as well as not being banned) must have brought him some relief.
So, I think everyone knows the basic story: the Freeling family live in their new house in their newly-built suburb and everyone is happy... until one night when youngest daughter Carol Anne starts talking to the static on the television after closedown and before you know it there are noisy spirits all over the house. At first the ghosts seem harmless enough; limiting themselves to moving furniture around and playing with the family dog. Then a tree comes to life and tries to eat the middle child Robbie and Carol Anne is sucked into the closet and vanishes. The Freelings have no other choice but to call in a team of parapsychologists to try to work out what is happening in their house and to get their daughter back, along with a diminutive psychic by the name of Tangina Barrons...
Poltergeist is another of those movies that became a cultural phenomenon. Even if you haven't seen it, you still know the plot, several of the characters, several scenes and can quote from it ("They're here!" being the most notable - and imitated - line that everybody knows). It's been sequelized, satirized, parodied and most recently remade. Much like The Exorcist was one of the must-see horror films of the 1970s, Poltergeist became one of the must-see horror films of the 1980s.
A large part of that is because it is quite clearly a Spielberg movie, to the point where the more cynical might wonder just how much directorial input Tobe Hooper had at all. You have the family unit, living happily in the suburbs, who face something alien/supernatural which threatens to tear them apart but in the end unites them as they triumph against the evil (whatever it is) and come out the other end stronger. The children - Robbie and Carol Anne - are the ones in danger for most of the movie, and perhaps most importantly, the family are ordinary people facing something unexplained. It's also memorable for having child characters (and actors) who are believable, competent and not ridiculously dubbed (although that last one really only applies to Italian cinema...), rather than twee and/or annoying brats as seems to be the usual fare in horror.
It's a very good film, although by today's standards several of the effects haven't held up too well, chief among them the scene where one character's face falls apart that is so obviously a puppet that you wonder how we were all so scared and horrified by it in the first place. I also found myself watching at least one other scene and thinking to myself, "Didn't I see this in Raiders of the Lost Ark too?" because their effects are that similar. Other big scenes, however, have held up very well - the Tree and Clown scenes, for example, because somewhere deep down we can all still identify with those childhood fears, and the climactic scenes at the end because the special effects team went and used real human skeletons rather than plastic ones because the former were cheaper. Thanks guys, they had to create a rule against that. For the most part though, the film's success hinges a lot on its characters being so ordinary that the audience found it easier to relate to them in the midst of all the supernatural horror, because when you can relate to characters you can understand and experience their fears so much better.
Of course, because it was such a successful and memorable horror film, someone had to go and do a remake, which came out here in the UK last week. I haven't personally seen this remake yet (and if you read this blog at least semi-regularly you should know my feelings on remakes) but from what I have heard it seems to have apparently missed the mark - and the point - when compared to the original. And was 3-D, because every fucking thing has to be 3-D now if they can cram it in somewhere. But it's not too surprising that the Poltergeist remake apparently isn't as good at the original, as lightning in a bottle generally only comes around once.
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