Fright master Tobe Hooper’s 1982 movie has Steven Spielberg’s fingerprints all over it, but has a disturbing, satirical edge that’s all its own
and niece of Joan Didion, killed in the year of the film’s release by her violent ex-boyfriend, and Heather O’Rourke, who died in 1988 at 12 years old after suffering cardiac arrest and septic shock connected with a bowel condition., who claimed to have had the basic story idea himself; nonetheless, the credited lead screenwriter and producer is Spielberg.
The story takes place in a new suburban housing estate in California, a classic Spielbergian habitat of kids Edenically riding around on their bikes, making mischief with their remote-control toy racing cars. Steve Freeling, played by Craig T Nelson – later to be– is an employee of the property company that has been putting up these homes on the site of a former 19th-century settlement. He has evidently been rewarded with living in one of these state-of-the-art houses.
It is young Carol Anne who is to sense something strange in the TV which stops transmitting after the national anthem is played last thing at night and the screen goes to a fuzzy white noise. Reassuring patriotism is replaced by evil. Approaching the TV screen, putting her face right up close to the set, she senses something there, something which only she can see and which invades their happy home.
There are some classic moments in Poltergeist. When Steve invites the three paranormal specialists to his home and shows them up the stairs to the closed door of his haunted bedroom, he listens dumbly to one of these experts frowningly explaining how some objects can move by millimetres over hours – then opens the door to reveal furniture flying wildly around the room.
The keynote of the film is O’Rourke’s eerie, ethereally pale face, illuminated by the unearthly light of the haunted TV. Her expression, with its faint and worrying smile, gives us a very Spielbergian close-encounters-type awe. But there’s something else as well: a disturbing hint that she has in some sense been seduced by the forces in the TV. There is a tiny, ambiguous touch of the devil child in her toothpaste smile: a coming together of Spielberg and Hooper.
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